Quentin Clarke, a young Baltimore lawyer, witnesses the pauper's funeral of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer he has become obsessed with.
Before long he is embroiled in trying to determine the poet's last hours and the strange circumstances of his death. So much so that he travels to Paris to find the investigator upon whom Poe based the character of Auguste Dupin, the detective who solved the mystery of the Murders in the Rue Morgue. Aside from finding an investigator called Duponte, the case also attracts the Baron Dupin, a flamboyant lawyer being hunted by creditors.
Needless to say it all goes wrong when both investigators cross the Atlantic and Dupin gets murdered by agents of the Emperor Napoleon III thinking he is Duponte, Clarke gets the blame and ends up in the jug, gets sprung out only to find he is no longer a suspect and then has to stop his Aunt from having him put away as a nutter. Along the way there are two romantic interests a pointless (but right on) sub plot involving a slave trader and a couple of explanations of Poe's death.
All very well but I found this book difficult to get into as the author has taken what could have been a great hack story idea and over intellectualised the plot and at times when Clarke was agonising over different choices I found I was just getting bored. Fair enough its very well researched and crammed with period detail but it just didn't do it for me.
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22/06/08 @ 18:12