The Poe Shadow

Hardcover

Fiction

372

2018-06-26 16:05:37

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found mumbling and incoherent, wearing someone else’s clothes, and holding a cane with a sword hidden inside that did not belong to him. At the hospital in Baltimore, Poe was reported to have cried out a series of strange utterances before dying. Newspapers reported conflicting causes of death. To this day, theories abound, ranging from the banal to the outrageous, as to what led to Poe’s death. A wealthy admirer of Edgar Allan Poe’s named Quentin Hobson Clark observes the circumstances of Poe’s bizarre death. Not willing to let the truth remain buried in his native Baltimore, Clark resolves that he will find the one person in the world capable of unravelling such an impenetrable mystery: the ’real’ Dupin - the man who was the model for Poe’s astoundingly brilliant fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Clark journeys to Paris to begin the investigation and tracks down a Frenchman named Auguste Duponte. But he finds a Duponte who is a shattered, ruined man, living in obscurity. But then the stakes are raised: Claude Dupin, an arrogant and ruthless lawyer hiding in London from his French creditors, and one of the candidates Clark initially considered as a possible source for Poe’s character, begins to promote himself as the model for the famous detective to the public and the press. The race between the two competing ’Dupins’ to solve Poe’s death heats up as Claude Dupin and his thugs manipulate the investigation in pursuit of immortality and wealth. Duponte and Clark enter a perilous struggle with crime, murder and literature that takes them through Paris and Baltimore and into a terrifying climax of discovery.

Harvill Secker

9780436205453

English

2018-06-26 16:05:37