'The book is a bravura performance, exhibiting the virtuosity that
has lit up all Sinclair's work.' - C.P. Snow, "Financial Times"
'This is a rich and satisfying hybrid work - part fiction and part
biography. Its hold on the reader stems, at least in part, from its
use of one of the most successful of literary formulae: the quest.
It was this structure which gave A.J.A. Symons's "The Quest for
Corvo" such hypnotic appeal.... Mr Sinclair's insights, credited to
Pons, are those of a distinguished novelist. He intuitively
perceives the relationship between Poe's life and work, anatomising
it in witty and sometimes brilliant prose.' - Paul Ableman,
"Spectator"
'Clever, macabre, spellbinding, "The Facts in the Case of E. A.
Poe" is Andrew Sinclair's brilliant combination of biography and
fiction, taken to the limits of the united genre.... T]he result is
a strangely disturbing and powerfully revealing piece of
literature, one Poe himself - if sober - might have genuinely
approved.' - "Houston Post"
' E]xtremely clever and enjoyable, and one that Poe might himself
have appreciated. Mr. Sinclair's dovetailing of Poe's life and
Pons's reflections is so smoothly done, and his narrative touch so
delicate, that those who know nothing of Poe's sad story are likely
to be held as firmly as those familiar with it.... The ghost of Poe
can have inspired few more entertaining or ingenious books.' -
Julian Symons, "New York Times"
'Sinclair is one of our most intelligent novelists, and "The Facts
in the Case of E. A. Poe" is a book full of wit, thought and
perception - an ingeniousness of composition which the author of
"The Raven" might have himself approved.' - "The Scotsman"
'The book (bionovel? autofictography? madnessscript?) turns out to
be a thoroughly absorbing read. The use of an eccentric fictional
biographer like Pons gives the "real" biographer, Sinclair, the
freedom to indulge in amusingly wild flights of speculative fancy
which he would no doubt have suppressed in a more conventional
work.' - "The Listener"
Ernest Albert Pons is a Holocaust survivor with an unusual coping
mechanism: he lives in the delusion that he is, in fact, Edgar
Allan Poe. His psychiatrist Dupin (chosen because he shares a name
with Poe's fictional detective) has a radical idea for treatment:
Pons must see for himself that he is not Poe by retracing the
poet's steps and writing an analysis of his life. As Pons pursues
Poe from his childhood and university years in Virginia to his
adult life in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, we gradually
learn the secrets of both men's pasts. But when Pons begins to
suspect Dupin may be engineering an elaborate scheme to kill him,
is it just another part of his delusion, or is Dupin plotting a
macabre twist worthy of Poe?
A wholly unique book that manages to blend seamlessly a
page-turning mystery with an important work of Poe criticism and
biography, "The Facts in the Case of E. A. Poe" (1979) was widely
acclaimed on its initial publication and returns to print in this
new edition, which includes a new introduction by Andrew Sinclair.
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