Only This and Nothing More

The Pale Blue Eye
Louis Bayard
Harper Perennial

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore (back issues of The Economist do count as quaint and curious, right?), while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping (as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my condo door.) "Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my condo door. Only this and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the warm September and ... okay ... enough. I don't think I can keep this up for the whole entry. If you haven't figured it out from the borrowed verse, this week's novel, The Pale Blue Eye, features a very young, and very melancholic Edgar Allen Poe as one of the main characters. Poe has been enlisted by the protagonist -- a wily, but retired, New York City constable -- to help investigate a series of gruesome murders at the West Point Military Academy. Like all great historical whodunits, The Pale Blue Eye if full of mayhem, murk, and melodrama, and Bayard skillfully keeps his readers guessing until the very end.

I have to be honest -- I didn't have a lot of expectations going into this book. Poe is such a huge figure in the American literary landscape/collective imagination that I was quite apprehensive as to how his character would be drawn. Would Poe be just another gimmick/tool to sell more books? It turns out that I needn't have worried. Bayard masterfully uses Poe's own themes, tropes and tone to somehow channel the spirit of the long-dead poet. Four shadowy ravens out of five.