MAN WHO WAS POE

An amusing adventure that suggests a Poe-style mystery of deduction, featuring Poe himself; as in Poe's stories, the reader deduces very little. In 1848 Edgar Allan Poe, drinking and wasted, is in Providence pursuing Mrs. Helen Whitman's hand—plus money to fund his new journal—when he meets 11-year-old Edmund from London, who has lost his twin sister, mother, and aunt. Poe, wavering between himself and his mask as Auguste Dupin (genius of Poe's Parisian mysteries), finds that the aunt has been drowned in Providence Bay. Meanwhile, the disappearance from a locked room of twin sister Sis—whose nickname is the same as that of Poe's late child-bride Virginia—sets Poe to writing a tale about what's happening around him. Truth and fiction do a Pirandello turn, with Poe confusing his autobiographical story with Edgar/ Edmund's. Though Poe himself is thinly drawn here, the period detail is somewhat better, and the mystery plot, while not fresh, will satisfy and (with luck) may draw readers into Poe's own tales.