‘Corpse’ fun read full of crazies, kooks

“The Tell-Tale Corpse”

by Harold Schechter (Ballantine, 320 pages, $24.95)

Fact and fiction blend beautifully – if creepily – in Harold Schechter’s “The Tell-Tale Corpse,” the latest in his series of novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe as a detective.

Don’t expect a brooding alcoholic. Poe has a dark side, to be sure, but in Schechter’s world, he’s Eddie, a devoted husband to an invalid wife, a patient teacher to a budding young writer and an insightful investigator. He’s also funny, pompous and easily flattered.

The case Schechter creates is right out of Poe’s most ghoulish works. Readers who know Poe’s short stories will see, in the twists the case takes, inspiration for the tales that made him the master of the macabre. Schechter’s dense but accessible style evokes the master’s own voice.

It opens, of course, with a grisly murder – a young woman is found dead, skinned and with several organs removed. Poe is asked by his friend, the showman P.T. Barnum, to travel to Boston and pick up a few artifacts of the crime that Barnum can display in his museum of atrocities.

While there, he urges Poe to look into the remarkable cures being done by Dr. Farragut. If anyone can cure Poe’s beloved wife, Sissy, of what ails her, it will be Farragut.

The good doctor turns out to be a fan of Poe (which endears him immediately to the writer), but before Farragut gets to work his magic, his box of ingredients needed for Sissy’s cure is stolen. Poe, believing this may be the last chance to save his wife, vows to find the box and rescue its contents.

But murder follows him in a seemingly unconnected way, and even touches the family of a young fan, a smart-as-a-whip girl named Louisa May Alcott – Louy, to those who know her. She is fascinated by Poe, and he and Sissy end up staying with the family (Louy’s father, a great critic of Poe, being out of town) as Louy helps him with his investigation.

Schechter draws a charming picture of the Alcotts’ home life.

Though his mystery is top drawer, confounding to the very end, Schechter gets bogged down in the Alcotts’ home and loses momentum in the cutesy world he draws there. But when things pick back up and Poe gets on the scent, it’s a race to the end, where a grisly surprise awaits.

“The Tell-Tale Corpse” is bloody good fun.