In a bizarre form of tribute no author would invite, Edgar Allan Poe has been cast as the inspiration for a number of fiendish murderers.
In Michael Connelly’s The Poet, a serial cop killer in Los Angeles gets his victims to write suicide notes that contain snatches of Poe’s verse. This same character returns in The Narrows.
All of New York City is in the thrall of “The Poe Killings” in Heather Graham’s suspense novel The Death Dealer. There has been a string of homicides mimicking Poe’s macabre stories and all of the victims have been members of a literary society devoted to the author.
Chicago is the scene of recent Poe inspired crimes in Sheldon Rusch’s For Edgar.
And somewhere back in time Harry Houdini teams up with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to investigate a series of chilling murders that imitate those found in Poe’s stories in William Hjortsberg’s Nevermore.
Several authors have used Poe’s letters, manuscripts and/or rare editions of his works to weave their tales of mystery and intrigue, including John Dunning in The Bookman’s Wake, Joanne Dobson in The Raven and the Nightingale, Lawrence Sanders in McNally’s Caper and Nancy Zaroulis in The Poe Papers.
Both Joel Rose in The Blackest Bird and Randall Silvis in On Night’s Shore weave the ill-fated Mary Rogers into their novels about Poe. The connection between Mary Rogers – the basis of the equally ill-fated Poe character Marie Roget – and Poe is explored in fascinating detail by Daniel Stashower in the true crime narrative The Beautiful Cigar Girl.
The Poe Shadow, a novel by Matthew Pearl, explores the identity of Auguste Dupin, another of Poe’s characters.
Linda Fairstein’s Entombed brings a Poe investigation into the 21st century when a skeleton is found bricked up behind a wall in a New York City building where the author once lived.
Laura Lippmann’s In a Strange City involves P.I. Tess Monaghan in an investigation of the murder of the “Poe Toaster" – a mysterious man who places a bottle of brandy and a red rose on Poe’s grave in Baltimore every January 19th.The Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be discussing In a Strange City on January 18th at 2 p.m.
The Library will be hosting several additional events in honor of Poe, including an appearance on January 11th at 2 p.m. by Poe interpreter David Keltz, who will recite The Raven and other remarkable “Poe-try” for us.
Mark Schenker, one of our favorite speakers, will present a talk on Poe in the context of the American Gothic and 19th-century Romanticism on January 8th at 7:30.
Westporter Susan Jaffe Tane will talk about her extraordinary collection of Poe documents on January 12th at 7:30, and there will be a sampling of letters and manuscripts from her collection on display in the Riverwalk Case on the lower level.
Using some of the additional items in Tane’s collection, graphologist Arlyn Imberman will offer us a professional opinion of just what Poe’s handwriting reveals about the author on January 15th at 7:30.
Hope you can join us.
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
