The Poe vogue

There seems to be a current vogue for contemporary fiction that casts Edgar Allan Poe as a character in the story. One such was The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl, which I commented on in my "Recent readings " posting of 6/17/06. In that story, Poe was posthumously cast as a character: a young lawyer, who had attended Poe’s funeral in Baltimore, became intent on solving the mysterious circumstances of his death and went to Paris to find Auguste Dupin (Poe’s fictional detective) in his quest. I described the book in that posting as an "overly-contrived potboiler" and noted that I didn’t finish it.

I believe I have recently seen something about another such Poe-as-a-character work of fiction, but I can’t recall it.

Yet another one I have just finished reading: The Pale Blue Eye*. It has Poe as a "fourth-classman" (a plebe) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York in the year 1831. (In real life, Poe did attend the Academy in 1831 but was expelled for neglect of duty before the year was out.) In this book the murder of a cadet has taken place on the Academy’s grounds for which the Academy’s superintendent calls in a former police detective from the New York City force, now retired and living in a small village near West Point, to find the killer. Not only was the cadet murdered by being hung from a tree, but his heart had been cut out and taken away. Two other murders under the same circumstances follow.

* The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard, Harper Collins, New York 2006, 414 pages

Because the young Poe is described in the novel as something of a weirdo given to scampish behavior, the detective, whose name is Gus Landor, soon makes his acquaintance and (with the reluctant acquiescence of the Academy’s superintendent) enlists him as a junior aide in solving the murders.

There is merit to much of the novel. Providing an authentic atmosphere to a special place at a time 175 years in the past–in this case, the Military Academy at West Point in 1831–by a present-day author is not easily done. Bayard does well in this respect. He also makes the detective Landor into an unflappable fellow–a trait which allows him to keep his cool when engaged with some of the military brass and their hidebound attitudes. (Likewise, as a widower, Landor has no trouble accepting the sexual favors of a buxom barmaid who lives nearby.) However, with Poe, the author is a bit less successful in projecting his character–he at times stretches too far in making him a roguish devil-may-care upstart.

But the book does have its shortcomings. The first is its length–in my opinion, 414 pages is far too long for detective fiction; I prefer no more than around 200 pages. There is a lot of filler (numerous encounters between various characters that add little to the flow of the story) that could better have been excised. However, scanning many of the pages to skip over the filler, but yet keep track of the story, was fairly easy.

Another fault was that the entire story consisted of written reports, letters, testaments, etc. by Landor and by Poe: "Last Testament of Gus Landor April 19th, 1831" (the opening chapter), "Narrative of Gus Landor November 1st to November 2nd", "Report of Edgar A. Poe to Augustus Landor November 16th" are examples. To have characters going through an entire story just writing such texts (although conversations are reported in the texts) strains the credulity of the reader.

The denouement comes in two parts. So as not to give away the endings, I can only say so much about them. The first part is very much third rate–it could have come from one of Edgar Wallace’s stories or from a Stephen King potboiler. The second part, however, is interesting. It is in the same style as one of Agatha Christie’s whodunits which was criticized by some critics but which I liked.