Lacking a telltale heart

WHEN Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, young readers in London wore black armbands to mourn (and protest) the passing of their most beloved detective. Doyle eventually gave in to the public outcry and revived his hero in a series of prequels. No such reaction for Edgar Allan Poe’s inspector, C. Auguste Dupin, whom Poe retired after three stories and who served as the model for Holmes. Poe could barely eke out a living writing now-classic tales, including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” The American press vilified him as a debauched drunkard and only more so after rumors surrounding his shady death in Baltimore in 1849.

The remarkable conceit of Matthew Pearl’s novel “The Poe Shadow” is that Poe’s Dupin gets recruited by a young Poe enthusiast to unravel the mysterious circumstances of the author’s end.

The novel opens on the day of Poe’s funeral in Baltimore. Quentin Clark is a promising young lawyer with everything going his way. He runs a thriving practice with his dutiful friend, Peter Stuart, and he’s about to be engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Hattie Blum. So far, so quaint. Except that Quentin has a feverish, almost debilitating addiction to Poe’s works. He has even corresponded with the author, offering to defend him in libel cases. After reading conflicting newspaper accounts of Poe’s last days -- and happening to pass by his makeshift funeral -- Quentin resolves to put his life on hold and salvage the writer’s reputation.

Pearl has meticulously researched his novel. The actual details surrounding Poe’s death -- he was found wearing someone else’s clothes and had assumed the pseudonym E.S.T. Gray to confuse his detractors -- are ripe for speculation. Many of the characters Quentin interrogates, including Poe’s relatives, correspond to real 19th century Baltimoreans. Pearl has even lifted dialogue from letters of the period.

Pearl’s attempts to impress us with his homework are sometimes awkward, but the daguerreotypes on the walls, athenaeum reading rooms, temperance societies, slave traders and pigs devouring garbage in the streets all contribute to the sense that the author could confidently amble his way around the antebellum city like any of its residents.

“The Poe Shadow” starts to falter when Quentin goes to Paris to recruit Dupin. Having found many of Poe’s stories to be based on real events, Quentin believes that Dupin too must be based on a real person. In Paris, he gets more than he bargains for: not one Dupin, but two. The first is an amateur inspector, Auguste Duponte, who reluctantly agrees to follow Quentin to Baltimore. The second is the Baron Dupin who, along with his unimaginatively named sidekick, Bonjour, kidnaps Quentin and then decides that solving Poe’s death will be his “passport to glory” (and may even help him thwart his creditors).

If this all sounds like a ridiculous, distracting subplot, it is. Not to mention that one of the Frenchmen is somehow implicated in “the future of France,” a reference to Louis-Napoleon’s Second Republic. Pearl has also tried to mimic the telltale registers of Poe’s prose. A typical sentence from Quentin runs: “Faithful use of the blank page before me would describe the ensuing despondency as I sat at my misted window overlooking the exodus of people from the offices surrounding ours.” Poe managed to use this overwrought style to his advantage, but here it simply sounds excessive.

When Quentin returns to Baltimore, he finds Peter engaged to Hattie, both of whom remain as unconvincing as when he left them. Duponte gets mistaken for Quentin’s “unmannered French pastry cook,” and the baron quickly makes Poe’s death the city’s cause celebre. Pearl plays out the remaining action with such studious earnestness that, by the time he reveals Poe’s true fate, we are hardly eager to learn it.

Pearl’s previous novel, “The Dante Club,” which centered on Oliver Wendell Holmes in a murder mystery set in 19th century Boston, exploited its historical location and achieved the suspense of a full-blooded mystery. “The Poe Shadow,” by contrast, suffers from an overabundance of historical references. Pearl’s narrative leapfrogs from fact to fact so much that any suspense eventually gets lost in transit. Why go to the trouble of revealing actual theories behind Poe’s death when they are only going to be melded together with a silly subplot about the future of France? Poe’s great talent could make the impossible seem eerily plausible. In Pearl’s case, it’s regrettably the opposite.

In his introduction to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales” (which Modern Library has reissued as a companion to “The Poe Shadow”), Pearl writes that “Poe’s place in literature will always be governed by the sharp punches of his poems and short stories, rather than the prolonged strokes of his novel [‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’].” True enough. One wonders, then, why a writer who mimics Poe’s prose style for nearly 400 pages thought he could succeed where the master stumbled.