Tangled Web UK Review March 2007
The Poe Shadow by
Matthew Pearl
pbk out January 07
(Vintage)
at £7.99
Pearl has already established his reputation in the sphere of literary fiction with
his debut novel The Dante Club. That was set in the Boston of the 1860s, and the literary
world of Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. They are to
reveal Dante's vision to the New World, when a series of murders divert them. Deaths
that are stolen from Dante's Inferno. The Poe Shadow has a more intimate, historical
theme – the strange death of Edgar A Poe himself.
It is October, 1849, and a lawyer called Quentin Clark is distracted from
proposing to his beloved by witnessing a curious funeral. He becomes even more
engrossed in the affairs of the deceased when he later learns it was the funeral of Edgar A
Poe. Clark is a lifelong admirer of Poe's works, and a defender of his somewhat
tarnished reputation. Like Poe's creation – C Auguste Dupin – Clark's primary object is
seeking out the truth. So when the strange circumstances of Poe's death are used to
suggest he was a drunkard despite signing the pledge, Clark risks his own reputation to
find the truth. The only help he can hope for is by enlisting the aid of the real-life
inspiration of Poe's detective, C Auguste Dupin. But is that Auguste Duponte, self-
effacing recluse, or flamboyant Baron Claude Dupin with his companion, female assassin
Bonjour? Unwittingly, Clark unleashes both men on respectable Baltimore, and must
solve the mystery to save his own reputation, indeed his very life.
In 1997, Pearl graduated from Harvard in English and American literature
'summa cum laude', and later from Yale Law School. His bona fides are therefore
impeccable, but you might imagine that he might have become too engrossed in the
minutiae of Poe's strange death. Not a bit of it. The facts, as known, are fascinating in
themselves, if little known outside literary circles. Why did Poe turn up in Baltimore?
Why was he found dying in a room in Ryan's Hotel and Tavern on polling day? Why
was he wearing clothes that were patently not his? And why did he ask his former
mother-in-law to correspond with him using the name E S T Grey? Pearl makes
ingenious use of the known facts to create a detective mystery worthy of Edgar A Poe
himself. And has not one but two detectives of widely differing manners seeking to solve
the case. Both are fictional, but apparently based on the many real candidates proposed
for the origins of Dupin. The mood is pure Poe, and the style exactly of the period –
nineteenth century but never stuffy or contrived. Pearl has another best seller on his
hands.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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