IThe Meta-Fictional Edgar Allen Poe

    I've been thinking a lot about Edgar Allen Poe recently, not his writing per se, or even his life as such.  Due to a weird coincidence I've read two mystery novels released in the last three months both of which treat the historical character of Poe as a character in the story.

    Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow was the first I read, and though Poe is dead at the beginning of the tale, it's the investigation into his murder that propels the plot along.  As the main character investigates the crime he realizes that his skills are not up to the task, and so he begins a search for the historical model of Poe's detective character Dupin, finding not one but two models for the character, who then compete to solve the murder.

    The second novel I read is Louis Bayard's Pale Blue Eye, which I'll grant being an ever so slightly superior novel by dint of the last ninety pages, which manage to throw everything you've read up to that point into question, leaving the reader almost dizzy as the author answers all the questions you didn't think to ask, and wraps up every plot point as perfectly as you can imagine.  In this novel Poe is a young cadet at West Point, and he teams up with a detective who we are to surmise, may be the model for his character Dupin.  I read a review a while back about both these books, and the reviewer said something I totally agree with.  The wonder is not that two mystery novels would come out utilizing elements from Poe's life as their basis, but that they would both be so excellent.

    Well, this got me thinking about Poe as a character, and I remembered the children's author Avi did a book, The Man Who Was Poe, in which Poe is enlisted by a young man to investigate a murder.  Suddenly, Edgar Allen Poe is shaping into an amateur detective, a 19th century Angela Lansbury.  And as the father of the modern detective novel (Dupin is the literary basis of most all detectives to follow, even Sherlock Holmes himself admits this) this makes sense, in weird, literary way.

    But wait, I read a lot, and I remembered another novel that featured Poe as Detective, and after a little research, I found out that there were four.  At least.  Harold Schechter is a well known true crime writer, who has wwritten extensively on serial killers and spree killers and the like.  It turns out he's written a series known as the Edgar Allen Poe Mysteries.  The Hum Bug, Nevermore, The Mask of the Red Death, and most recently, The Tell-Tale Corpse.  In Nevermore Poe is teamed up with Davy Crockett, the famous frontiersman and congressman, to solve a series of grisly murders. Suddenly, Poe is a very busy sleuth indeed.

    If Poe is the father of modern detective fiction then a case can be made for Poe as father of science fiction as well.  If he could have adventures as detective could he not also have adventures as a science fictional hero?  It turns out he can.  In a recent episode of The Venture Brothers, a cartoon series on the late night Adult Swim area of the Cartoon Network, Edgar Allen Poe is drawn into a ludicris time travel adventure involving mummies and Caligula.  At one point Dean Venture wonders if the stress of these adventures might not make Poe crazy.

    Then I find out about Rudy Rucker's The Hollow Earth.  I haven't read it yet, it's to be reprinted by Monkey Brain books soon though.  In this book Poe teams up with a young boy, a dog and a freed black slave to journey to Antarctica and into the hollow earth, following the path laid out in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and later evolved by HP Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness.

    Other snippets of info rise in my thoughts.  In the Illuminati Trilogy it is mentioned that writers of weird tales, Poe, Bierce, Lovecraft etc. seem to die early or mysteriously.  A sinister plot is alluded to.  Poe's stories are adapted into other piece's of weird fiction, Erik, the "Phantom of the Opera" uses The Mask of the Red Death as a theme during one of his rare public appearances.

    So what does this all add up to?  It adds up to me looking for more information on Edgar Allen Poe, writer, detective, adventurer, and time traveller.  This new Poe, discovered in works of "fiction" is much more interesting than the one commonly depicted in his biographies.  When a real person enters the realm of fiction with such force, it changes the way we look at both history, fiction and legend.