Time spent as a West Point cadet is, at best, a modest chapter in Edgar Allan Poe’s life. He lasted for all of six months before being discharged for disobeying orders. Louis Bayard, in “The Pale Blue Eye,” imagines that Poe, while at the Academy, encountered a macabre chain of events and made an unlikely friendship with a retired policeman. And that these events could have helped shape the writer Poe was to become.
Augustus “Gus” Landor finds his sojourn in the Hudson Valley good for his health but generally uneventful. Once a constable with the New York City police, he lost both his wife and his daughter soon after leaving the city. His solitary existence is re-formed when a lieutenant from nearby West Point arrives at his home to invite Landor to meet with the Academy’s superintendent. It’s not a command performance; the military has no control over Landor’s actions. But upon consideration Landor realizes his current life is a little staid. He agrees to go.
Superintendent Thayer and his second-in-command, Commandant Hitchcock, begin by telling Gus of the hanging death of Cadet Leroy Fry. Though this is the first suicide in the Academy’s history, this is not why men are looking for Landor’s help. Fry’s corpse had been removed from the hospital and when later located – on the Academy grounds near the ice house – the heart had been carved from his chest.
Landor is an investigator with a Holmesian bent, with combined gifts of observation and deduction. His suspicion that one or more cadets may be involved in the crime does not set well with Thayer and Hitchcock. Landor needs an ally in the cadet community. He’s met Cadet Fourth Classman Poe and suspects, despite the fact that the young man is poorly matched with his peers, that he might be exactly the eyes and ears Landor needs.
In many ways, the two are well-matched. Landor has both a sounding board and a student. Poe has an adult willing to tolerate his flights of fancy and what, at the time, are little more than literary pretensions. Their dark investigation becomes more bleak after the death and mutilation of a second cadet. Several suspects come into focus. One is a cadet who is the brother of a young woman with whom Poe has fallen in love. One, at least to the military hierarchy, is Poe himself.
The narrative initially spools forth from Landor’s point of view, but, as the story moves on, more of Poe is seen. Much is a historically accurate rendering, at least to the degree that the writer’s time at the academy can be documented. More interesting, though, is the author’s subtle premise that Poe’s later writings, both morose and gruesome, could have grown from the type of heartbreak and crime that are the basis of this tale.
Bayard’s well-received previous novel, “Mr. Timothy,” mined a literary vein, imagining Dickens’ Tiny Tim all grown up. “The Pale Blue Eye” is a variation on this theme. Both novels imagine how the boy’s, or in this case the young man’s, experiences form the adult. Both are psychologically brooding mysteries, and both are constructed of carefully selected, never superfluous detail. The who- (and why-) dunit aspects propel a story that is full of delightfully unexpected twists that continue, to the very last pages of the novel, to take the reader by surprise.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
The Pale Blue Eye
By Louis Bayard
HarperCollins, 432 pages, $24.95
