Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

The circumstances leading to Poe's death in Baltimore, in October 1849, remain a mystery befitting the father of the modern detective story. Walsh, the author of several literary biographies and winner of the 1969 Edgar Award for Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind the Mystery of Marie Roget, takes up the case with a zeal that his subject would have admired. Did Poe drink himself to death, as is widely believed? Or was he the naive victim of unknown--or known--thugs? Adopting a flavorful but unobtrusive 19th-century style (""In that situation, surely, there resides a macabre rightness""), Walsh begins the tale with Poe in Richmond that July, courting his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Shelton, by then a wealthy widow. Poe swore off alcohol, set a date for the wedding and went north to Philadelphia and New York, his future looking serene. But after a gap of five days, Poe was found drunk and in borrowed clothes in a Baltimore saloon, and he died in a hospital three days later. Walsh, a patient gumshoe, sifts through decades of acquaintances' contradictory explanations (including the ""cooping"" theory, which has Poe drugged by election-eve goons and forced to vote in eleven wards). Finally, with an eye to Poe's libertine reputation, Walsh presents his own solution to the puzzle in a romanticized but plausible re-creation of events. Will it settle the mystery once and for all? Probably not. But it will behoove future biographers to consider the hypotheses Walsh has laid over the curious blank of Poe's death. (Nov.)