A dream within a dream

Dante Club author Matthew Pearl's latest literary thriller is fun summer escapism of the highest order. By Edward O'Hare

The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. €17.99

On the 3 October 1849 a raving man appeared in the streets of Baltimore. He was taken to hospital where the staff watched in amazement as he fended off attacks from imaginary beings. By the 7 October he was dead. The cause of the fatality was later described as "a congestion of the brain". The following day a three-minute funeral service was held, attended by a tiny handful of mourners. At the age of 40 the wretched life of Edgar Allen Poe, which he once described as "but a dream within a dream", was over.

The Poe Shadow is the new novel by the American author Matthew Pearl. It is the follow-up to his acclaimed and million-selling 2003 debut The Dante Club. In that novel Pearl showed a shrewd ability to interweave the historical and the fantastical into a convincing narrative. In The Poe Shadow Pearl wields these skills with great precision, this time with a peculiar twist. The Dante Club followed the efforts of an actual group of Dante scholars to unmask a fictional killer. In The Poe Shadow Pearl uses fiction to investigate one of the world's great mysteries, the death of Edgar Allen Poe.

When Poe died suddenly neither his friends nor his enemies were very surprised. Poe had been plagued by insanity all his life. He had attempted to mitigate this misery by indulging in epic drinking bouts. Instead it was the peculiar circumstances of his demise that attracted speculation. When Poe was found in Baltimore he was not wearing his own clothes and shouted out "Reynolds" and "Herring", names that meant nothing to those who knew him.

The most bizarre thing was that Poe should never have even been in Baltimore at all. A distinguished journalist, he had left Richmond, Virginia for New York. When he surfaced in Baltimore he had been missing for an entire week. The enigma of his disappearance catches the attention of the novel's fictional hero, Quentin Hobson Clark, a young lawyer with an obsessional interest in Poe's works. On learning of Poe's death Clark sets out to prevent what he thinks will be the inevitable literary crime – character assasination. It is only later that Clark is led to suspect that Poe's assassination may have been more than just metaphorical.

Confused by the indifference of the authorities to his hero's death, Clark looks to the one place where he thinks the truth can be found, Poe's own writings. It is here that Pearl unveils the masterstroke concept of the novel. Clark realises that the only person who can unravel the mystery of Poe's death is the man who acted as the model for his most famous creation, the brilliant private detective C Auguste Dupin.

Clark sets sail for France and in the teeming underworld of Paris he finally discovers that the title of model for Poe's celebrated sleuth is claimed by not one man but two. The first is Auguste Duponte, a lawyer and crook. The second is Baron Claude Dupin, an investigator whose deductive powers are rather less than those of his fictional counterpart. Unable to decide for certain which Dupin is the Dupin, Clark brings both to America.

The trio of investigators soon learn that Poe's death was but a single strand of a vast web of international political conspiracy involving the Baltimore slave trade. Clark has become embroiled in a deadly game and he must now make sense of Poe's death if he is to prevent his own. An ingenious and thoroughly exciting novel, The Poe Shadow has all the ingredients that make for a summer blockbuster. Pearl has made a wise move in writing a novel about Edgar Allen Poe and he makes much use of the myth that surrounds him.

Pearl has an uncanny ability to replicate a writing style similar to Poe's. The America he depicts, so close and yet so far from the one we know today, is an otherworldly place. Pearl's powers of description are slightly let down by his inability to come up with a compelling central character. Heroes are always the most boring characters in fiction and Quentin Clark has little of interest about him. Pearl is obviously afraid of making him too strange but instead Clark is a lifeless creation.

To compensate, Pearl summons up a rogue's gallery of quirky supporting characters who are just the sort of oddities you want to meet in a book like this. Pearl is especially gifted when it comes to creating fiendish villains. One character in particular is worthy of a novel of her own. This is Bonjour, a disfigued yet alluring lady assassin who is certainly the novel's most captivating presence.

After a lengthy opening the book rushes headlong into adventure. Every few pages Pearl adds another surprise revelation. However, the pompous 'Historical Note' which follows the text of the novel leaves the reader cold. In this note Pearl states that his own historical research has brought to light new evidence about Poe's death which leads him to claim to have actually discovered what happened to him. This misjudged bit of egotism threatens to spoil what is otherwise an enormously enjoyable piece of escapism. Poe's death will always remain a mystery. He would have wanted it that way. p