Poe Shadow, The

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found mumbling and incoherent, wearing someone else's clothes, and holding a cane with a sword hidden inside, that did not belong to him. At the hospital in Baltimore, the great writer was reported to have cried out a series of strange utterances before dying. Newspapers reported conflicting causes of death. To this day, theories abound, ranging from the banal to the outrageous. A wealthy admirer of Poe's, named Quentin Hobson Clark, observes the circumstances of Poe's bizarre death. Determined not to let the truth remain buried in his native Baltimore, Clark resolves that he will find the one person in the world, capable of unravelling such an impenetrable mystery - the man who was the model for Poe's astoundingly brilliant fictional detective, C Auguste Dupin. Clark travels to Paris to begin the investigation and tracks down a Frenchman named Auguste Duponte. But he finds Duponte a shattered, ruined man, living in obscurity. But then the