"The Poe Shadow" by Matthew Pearl

"The Poe Shadow" by Matthew Pearl.  I thought this novel would read much the same as Matthew Pearl's, "The Last Dickens".  Unfortunately, I think it lacked much of the action that too place in "The Last Dickens."  Although we do see the action the sought out aid of the real-life model for Poe's genius-sleuth, detective C. Auguste Dupin who comes to America in the search of the real killer of Poe.  I would have appreciated a little less of the discrete details of this detective, and appreciate more of a glimpse inside Edgar Allan Poe's career and details leading up to his death.

Pearl writes too much about Dupin, who cares if the detective was rude to his house servants and unfriendly.  Who cares that he disregarded a person when they talked. He was a detective after all, a man of observation not a man of social etiquette. I didn't expect to be reading Sherlocke Holmes, but with this novel I may as well have read the whole Sherlocke series with the depth of detective characteristics shown. 

The way that the french detective explains his perception of Americans once he arrives in America does not surprise me.  He says that Americans are rude, that they are too direct and spit their tobacco juice on the streets: unawares of any passer-by.