Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow may well be the best new novel I’ve read in a very long time.  It’s led me to purchase his prior novel, The Dante Club, which I’m enjoying presently.  I’m not entirely sure what caused me to pick up The Poe Shadow when I saw it on the new releases table at Barnes and Noble.  The cover was unassuming, and I hadn’t read any reviews or received any recommendations.  However, I am glad I did.  From the first page to the last, I loved this book.

Often times I breeze through a good fiction quickly, but I found my approach to this novel different from others.  Although I was certainly enraptured by its story, I found myself savoring each word and often rereading sentences and paragraphs.  Instead of stealing time to read a page here and there, I set aside time and waited to enjoy it much in the way I might a fine cigar or nice bottle of pinot noir.

The Poe Shadow takes place in Baltimore in 1849 and being written in the first person, contains the quaint dialogue of the time.  In this manner, it reminded me a lot of a Dickens novel or one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, except with an American bent.  It’d be more accurate to say that it’s written in the manner of one of the titular Edgar Allen Poe mysteries which were written some forty years before the Holmes novels, but being ignorant of Poe’s work outside of The Raven and some short stories, I could only think of Sherlock Holmes.  However, Matthew Pearl has convinced me to pursue some Poe novels which I expect to be reading soon.

Since I’ve already claimed ignorance, I may as well continue with my Sherlock Holmes comparison.  Like the Holmes novels, excepting one, this story isn’t told through the voice of the astute detective.  While the Holmes novels are told by the venerable doctor, Dr. John H. Watson, The Poe Shadow is told by an esteemed attorney named Quentin Hobson Clark who decides he must defend the honor of Edgar Poe after his unfortunate death and subsequent vilification in the press.

Clark is dismayed to learn that the author he so admired and with whom had begun a correspondence isn’t receiving his due respect in the public.  He is even more dismayed to learn the police haven’t begun any kind of investigation into the matter of Poe’s death despite the unusual and unexplained circumstances.  Thus, Clark sets out to solve the mystery of Poe’s demise and entrench the author firmly in the minds and hearts of an American audience.

To add depth to the story, Pearl nicely weaves in an alternate and possibly more significant motive for Clark’s sense of urgency when he reveals that the young attorney’s parents recently perished in a carriage accident.  The closeness of this tragic turn and Clark’s expected nuptials to a childhood sweetheart that would set to define his future both send the narrator scrambling for anything different and exciting.  When he witnesses, albeit unknowingly at first, Poe’s sparse funeral service and reads the newspapers’ accounts of the author’s last days, he discovers an outlet for all these pent up emotions and leaps into the matter without ever looking back.  He abandons his law practice, risks his neck, and ultimately everything he owns in pursuit of a mystery that many doubt even exists.

Clark convinces himself that the media’s account, the police department’s lack of interest, and Poe’s relatives’ reluctance to discuss the matter are all signs of a sinister plot.  When he struggles to untangle the mess for himself, he decides to enlist the one man he feels can solve the enigma: the real-life model for Poe’s fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin.  Unfortunately, with Poe deceased and little information available, Clark has a difficult time identifying the nonpareil detective.  He eventually narrows his selection between two prominent citizens of Paris: a fellow attorney named Baron Claude Dupin who has never lost in court, and a freelance agent to the police named Auguste Duponte who helped solve several difficult, publicized cases.

Clark decides that Duponte is the more likely candidate for Poe’s inspiration and sets off for Paris in anticipation of luring the detective back to America with promises of fame, fortune, and an interesting puzzle.  From the moment he arrives in Paris, things don’t go quite as he had expected.  First, he discovers that his presence in Paris isn’t exactly appreciated by the police commissioner who has held a simmering jealousy from Duponte’s previous feats.  Then even after he finally tracks down Duponte, the detective is completely unwilling to even consider the matter, spending days in a pensive state, barely uttering but a few words to the American gentleman.  To make matters worse, one day during a tour of the palace of Versailles, Clark is abducted by the Baron Dupin who boasts that he is the role-model for the fictional detective.  Despite Clark’s protests that the real Dupin would never have employed a gang of ruffians or acted in such a manner, the Baron declares that he will set off for America to claim his fame and fortune, without need of Clark’s assistance.  This chain of events sets the clock ticking for Clark who must now persuade the detective to join the adventure, solve the mystery, and restore Poe’s good name before the faux Dupin muddies the waters and claims victory for himself.

Throughout the story, Matthew Pearl introduces many interesting characters and sub-plots that include a French female assassin, the American family of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the heated political climate of nineteen century Baltimore, the declining Atlantic slave trade, and of course the continued pressures in Clark’s life that had originally set him off on his pursuit.  It is to Pearl’s credit that he accomplishes all this without ever confusing the reader or clouding the mystery that is at the heart of The Poe Shadow.  Further, it is interesting to note how many of the details of the case are true to their original and the interesting, previously unknown factoids Pearl discovered during his research into the novel; he outlines these in his afterword to the book.  I also found it interesting that although completely different in context, I was reminded of Dan Brown’s work in that both authors exhaustively research a subject and then build a mystery around the actual or perceived facts of the setting; Dan Brown gave a recommendation on the jacket for both The Poe Shadow and The Dante Club.  So far, I’m really enjoying The Dante Club and will write about it when I finish.

"To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”
Edgar Allen Poe