Book #60: The Poe Shadow

Title: The Poe Shadow
Author: Matthew Pearl

In The Poe Shadow, Quentin Clark, a young lawyer living in Baltimore, gives up love and livelihood in an obsessive search to lift Edgar Allan Poe's name out of the gutter after he died in embarrassing circumstances. Clark's travels take him to Paris, where he finds not one, but two men who consider themselves the inspiration for Poe's famous detective, Dupin. Clark and the two Dupin's work against each other to solve the mystery surrounding Poe's death.

Pearl's novel The Dante Club was released to high acclaim several years ago. I haven't read it, but picked up The Poe Shadow based on its reputation. His second novel was pretty good, but it was a slow read. Pearl did such a great job of tapping into the loquaciousness of the 19th century novel, where writers were paid by the word (Huck Finn or Great Expectations, anyone?) that it seemed hard for me to believe at times that The Poe Shadow was written in the 21st-century. Overall, the story satisfied-- it even ended in a relatively predictable scene of Victorian-era domestic bliss, but the pace seemed more suited to a horse-drawn carriage than a modern minivan.