In the Shadow of the Master by Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Connelly Read Free Book Online Page B

may have been the only time I publicly handed Poe’s classic tale to Stevenson, I’d been confused about its authorship ever since I read the story. Which, if memory serves (and you can already tell what ill service it tends to provide), came about in the seventh grade, some fifty-seven years ago.
    One of our textbooks in English class was a small blue volume of short stories, one of which was “The Cask of Amontillado,” and one was something by Stevenson. (I seem to recall the title of the Stevenson story as “The Master of Ballantrae,” but that’s impossible, because that’s the title of a novel. So I don’t know what the Stevenson story may have been, and, God forgive me, I don’t care either.)
    I don’t know what else I may have retained from the seventh grade, but one thing I held on to was that story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”
     
    “For the love of God, Montresor!”
    “Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”
     
    They don’t write ’em like that anymore, and I knew that even then. But somehow I got it into my head that the author’s initials were R.L.S., not E.A.P. Now and then it would come up in conversation, and someone would say I meant Poe, didn’t I? And I’d say yes, of course, and stand corrected-but not for long, because my memory remained inexplicably loyal to Stevenson.
    Well, really. Where did I get off looking to win an Edgar? If the Red Sox could go that long without a World Series win just because their cheapjack owner let go of Babe Ruth, what did I expect?
     
    And then, of course, everything changed.
    Because I started keeping company with a young woman named Lynne Wood.
    And why, you may ask, should that serve to lift the curse of Amontillado? Perhaps the answer will become clear when I tell you that the maiden name of Ms. Wood’s mother, Emilie, was Poe.
    She was not the first person I’d met with that surname. Back in the eighth grade, a mere year after I’d read about Montresor and the ill-named Fortunato, I had a classmate named William Poe. His family had just moved north from Alabama, and that made him an exotic creature indeed at PS 66 in Buffalo, New York. We teased him relentlessly about his accent-and I wouldn’t be surprised if that helped reinforce the curse, now that I think about it. I don’t know that anyone asked if he was related to
the
Poe, but he very likely would have answered that he was, because they all are. The Poes, that is.
    Of course, none of them are direct descendants of Edgar Allan, because the poor fellow had no living issue. But he has plenty of collateral descendants, and one of them was named Emilie, and she had a daughter named Lynne.
    Reader, I married her.
    And within the year my short story “By the Dawn’s Early Light” was nominated for an Edgar. Lynne and I attended what I’d come to term the Always-A-Bridesmaid Dinner, but this time I went home with a porcelain bust of my bride’s great-great-great-etc.-uncle.
    It has, I blush to admit, been joined by others in the years that followed. Coincidence?
    I don’t think so.
     
    ***
     
    Lawrence Block once read “The Bells” at a New York Parks Department event at the Poe House in the Bronx and, flying in the face of popular demand, repeated the performance at a similar gala a year or two later. As editor of Akashic’s forthcoming anthology
Manhattan Noir II-The Classics,
he made a point of including “The Raven,” figuring you can’t get a whole lot noirer than that. His sole other connection to Edgar Allan Poe is, as he makes evident in his essay in this volume, by marriage. But he does collect busts of the great author and has five of them arrayed on a shelf where he can see them even as he types these lines.

The Black Cat

    FOR THE MOST WILD yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not- and very surely do I not