It's 1834 and the rambunctious frontiersman Davy Crockett, visiting Baltimore as part of a national tour to promote his autobiography, calls on the tyro writer Edgar Allan Poe to ask him in no uncertain terms why he gave the book such a rotten review. Any fisticuffs are precluded by the discovery nearby of a horrible murder -- a body so powerfully mangled that the killer seems to have possessed the strength of, say, a giant ape rather than a man . . . And so the two are plunged into adventures as they go on the trail of a serial killer who seems always to be thinking one step ahead of them and who, if witnesses including Poe himself are to be believed, looks uncannily like a certain E.A. Poe.

The book's blurb bills it as a "marvelous work of fiction in the tradition of . . . The Alienist", a description that does it a great disservice. In reality it's an ingenious comedy rather than a thriller; we soon cotton on that the experiences the young Poe is undergoing are in later years, often with little more than cosmetic revision, going to form the bases of his best-known fictions. The text is written as by Poe himself, with all the prissiness, snobbishness, hypochondriac self-absorption, self-conscious pseudo-intellectualism, lit'rary flourishes, and copious use of italics to convey just how ghastly things often are; impressively, although one might expect the narrative to be turgid as a result, Schechter manages to make it very readable -- in part because of the dialogue he gives Crockett, which is full of malapropisms and hilarious "down home-style" nonce-words even as he tells his tall tales of bravado in the wilds. Best are those moments when the two men's styles are set in juxtaposition:

". . . I saw a thunderbolt a-coming, and I dodged my mouth right under it, and -- bang! -- it went clear down my throat! My land! It was as if a whole tribe of buffaloes was kicking inside my bowels. My heart spun around amongst my insides like a grindstone going by steam, but the lightning went clear through me and tore my trousers clean off as it come out t'other end.

"I had a mighty sore gizzard for two weeks afterward, and my innards was so hot that I used to eat raw vittles and they would be cooked before they got fairly down my throat.

"But that-there e-lectricity plumb did the job -- for I ain't never felt love since."

While this crude backwoods "yarn" -- with its unseemly emphasis on alimentary processes -- struck me as entirely unsuitable for the dinner table, it elicited a lively, not to say intemperate, display of amusement from both Muddy and Sissy. [p168]

"Sissy" is Poe's cousin Virginia Clemm, his darling angel whom he'd marry soon after the events of this tale, when she was just 13. Here he dotes on her every slightest flounce or display of precocity, with the result that she comes across to the reader, often hilariously, as an over-indulged little brat who might better have benefited from a spell in the coal hole than marriage.

Some of the jokes flew past me; for example, I don't know why Schechter renamed one of the book's in Roderick Asher's (sic) library as Virgliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae, rather than render its title as in "The Fall of the House of Usher": Vigiliæ Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ (the book seems to have been invented by Poe). Nor do I know why the usages in the text mix UK and US English; perhaps this was a trait of Poe himself (of whose work I've read little since my teens).

Overall, however, I was thoroughly entertained and diverted for 322 pages, and was genuinely reluctant to turn the final page. I gather Schechter has done some sequels, and I'll make a point of looking out for those.

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Here is an historical novel about Edgar Allan Poe which is also a Poe pastiche. The main plot is about Poe teaming up with Davy Crockett (!) in Baltimore to solve a series of gruesome murders. The theme is the contrasts between the robust, vulgar natural man and the sensitive, romantic intellectual. The author, who also writes non-fiction 'true crime' books, is clever enough not to make one of the partners superior to the other; they form a coniunctio oppositorum.

Schechter uses the common method of writing an historical novel about an author: he proposes that the authors fictions from that time were based on actual events. You can identify the stories used here by hints dropped pretty broadly in the book.

Schechter attempts to imitate Poe's style: the book is narrated by Poe. He does not capture Poe's brilliance (who could?) but he does get the showy, patchy erudition and florid grandiloquence of the autodidact. He also shows Poe's self-image as a Southern Gentleman with a prickly sense of honor and as a brilliant, struggling, ambitious young author.

The resolution of the mystery is ingenious in that it does not draw on Poe's stories but it is compatible with known facts of Poe's biography. ( )

This book was awful. Not to be confused by the novel of the same name by william hjortsberg. THAT one was good. ( )