Poe left Richmond in the early morning of Sept. At the time of his death, Poe was traveling from Richmond to Philadelphia in order to raise money for a new magazine. In his new novel, there may or may not have been a crime, since the known facts surrounding Poe’s death remain a puzzle for scholars. Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, as well as Longfellow-but invented the murders. In The Dante Club, Pearl wrote about a real club-whose members included such heavily bearded worthies as Dr. Riding on the coattails of the extremely successful The Dante Club, the Modern Library reprinted Longfellow’s charmingly dated version, with Pearl’s introduction, but without instructions for decoding lines like these: “Upon this journey, whence thou givest him vaunt, Things did he hear, which the occasion were Both of his victor and the papal mantle.”

Pearl isn’t the first crime writer to dabble in Dante the great Dorothy Sayers produced a serviceable translation of the Divine Comedy. In his deft debut novel, The Dante Club (2003), set in Boston just after the Civil War, the police are forced to rely on a group of Harvard-affiliated amateurs-and Dante aficionados-to track down a serial killer whose murders are based on the tortures in Dante’s Inferno, which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is busy translating. Author tour.A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School, Pearl has a knack for the clever premise, as well as sufficient legal training to know his way around detectives and courthouses. While Clark remains a little enigmatic, the exciting plot, numerous twists and convincing period detail could help land this on bestseller lists as well. Pearl masterfully combines fact with fiction and presents some genuinely new historical clues that help reconstruct Poe's final days. The lawyer journeys to France to track down the real Dupin, in the hopes that the detective can help him solve the puzzle of Poe's death. Clark's preoccupation soon becomes all-consuming, imperiling his practice and his engagement, especially after he learns that Poe's legendary master sleuth, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin, was modeled after a real person. Poe's ignominious funeral catches the notice of Quentin Clark, a young, idealistic attorney, who finds himself obsessed with rescuing Poe's reputation amid rumors that the writer died from an excess of drink. (2003), will eagerly embrace his second novel, a compelling thriller centered on the mysterious end of Edgar Allan Poe, who perished in Baltimore in 1849.

Fans of Pearl's bestselling debut, The Dante Club

The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl