Edgar Allan Poe is our Founding Literary Enigma. Born in Boston in 1809 to actor parents, he was orphaned and taken in at around age 3 by the prosperous Allan family of Virginia. What followed was a short, troubled life — Poe died under mysterious circumstances at age 40 — leaving a legacy of essays, eerie poems and short stories. Among his triumphs is the detective story, which Poe invented. The greatest mystery Poe generated, however, remains unsolved: that of the source of his almost supernatural talent and its lasting hold on readers.
Many biographers and critics have tried to crack that mystery, but if I were rash enough to speak for Poe, I think he might give Emily Ogden's slim, strange new book, Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe, his blood-red waxen seal of approval.
Ogden, who's a professor at Poe's alma mater, the University of Virginia, says she fell under his spell when she had to teach his work. Here's how Ogden explains her project:
This is a book about Edgar Allan Poe. But as much as it is about Poe himself, it is about Poe’s followers and fellow travelers: those of us who ... have let him be our guide into the darkness. Much of the time, the dark side is the last place we want to look. ...
To join his crew of castaways, you need to be ready to go to the edges of human experience: to madness, to loneliness, to pain and the causing of pain. You need to follow him.
Ogden's book is an unconventional mix of biography, exploration of the obsession he inspired in translators like Charles Baudelaire, and her own account of how Poe's work infiltrates her thoughts. She frames Darkness Becomes Bright with a true-life incident drawn from the diary of one of Poe's friends, a Philadelphia engraver named John Sartain.
In 1849, an agitated Poe turned up at Sartain's workshop and insisted they go on a "midnight ramble" to the Fairmount Water Works, an early municipal water facility. There, for hours on a platform high above the Schuylkill River, Sartain kept his friend from jumping. Ogden incisively explores how Poe's work emerged both because of, and despite, such personal torments.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle regarded Poe as unsurpassable when it came to detective fiction: "Poe ... [wrote Doyle] was the father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own."
Fortunately, Doyle needed to supplement his unprofitable medical practice, so he tried his hand at a mystery story anyway and published his first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. In total, 59 more tales would follow, and Holmes and Dr. Watson would attain that rarest form of literary immortality: People so believe in their existence that letters from hopeful clients still arrive at 221B Baker Street.
Doyle and his characters have been so thoroughly excavated by scholars it's hard to believe any clues have been missed. But I've learned not to underestimate medical historian Lindsay Fitzharris. Her nonfiction book, The Facemaker, about pioneering World War I plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, was one of my top books of the year in 2022.
In her new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, Fitzharris delves into the story of two doctors: surgeon Joseph Bell and early forensics expert Henry Duncan Littlejohn, who made such lasting impressions on one med student at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary that, along with a ballistics expert named "Dr. Watson," Doyle gave them all a second life in literature.
Bell is the best-known figure: Nicknamed "the demon of diagnosis," he could tell a patient's occupation by reading the scars on his hands. What Fitzharris illuminates is Bell's investigative work with Littlejohn on some of Scotland's most horrific murder cases — even, she says, the Jack the Ripper case. Along the way, Fitzharris gives readers brief-but-fascinating histories of, among other things, toxicology, anesthesiology and the field of public health.
Both these revelatory books delve into figures whose stories have been oft told and, yet, as Poe's detective story "The Purloined Letter" suggests, sometimes telling details still hide in plain sight, waiting to be discovered.
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