Louis Bayard on Poe
Wandering through Bouchercon in Baltimore, I was impressed by the love and loyalty that conference-goers held for the mystery genre. And every author I bumped was down-to-earth, funny and entertaining, the kind of folks you'd want to relax and have a beer with. In that spirit, I hereby create Mystery Monday on Read Street, and promise to feature the genre each week.
For the first MMoRS, here's Louis Bayard, author of The Black Tower, on Edgar Allen Poe, whose "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is seen as the birth of detective fiction. In 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth. there will be a renewed focus on the noir master, and we'll be writing more about that on Read Street. But first, Bayard recounts a Poe sighting (of sorts) at Bouchercon:
This morning, I was approached by a young man bearing an Edgar Allan Poe action figure. I very nearly wrapped him in a bear hug because I had the exact same action figure sitting over my desk when I wrote The Pale Blue Eye, my fictional account of Poe’s days as a West Point cadet.
Strictly speaking, there wasn’t much action to the figure—his head moved a bit—but the symbolism was undeniable. If you’re a mystery writer, then one way or another, Poe is looking over your shoulder. He’s the guy who got there ahead of everyone else.Baltimore, of course, has its own longstanding claims to the guy, being the place where he lived and died. But Ed Pettit, our panel’s moderator, has made a lot of noise on behalf of Philadelphia, and fellow panelists Shelley Costa Bloomfield (author of The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe) and Dan Stashower (author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl) facetiously plumped for their hometown of Cleveland, which can safely be considered neutral ground because Poe never went there.
Me, I put in a strong oar for Paris, another city Poe never visited. Paris, after all, is where Poe set his world-famous detective stories, and it was the French who resuscitated Poe’s reputation after it had fallen into oblivion in his home country.If we were diplomatic, I suppose, we would just say Poe belongs to everyone. Except he really belongs to no one. His country of residence was Edgar Allan Poe, and he never emigrated and never needed to. He found everything he needed right in the rag-and-bone shop of his own heart and never once flinched at what he saw. If that doesn’t merit an action figure, I don’t know what does.
To read all the Bouchercon author posts, click here.
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
