Brief description:
From the dust jacket:
At West Point Academy in 1830, the calm of an October evening is shattered by the discovery of a young cadet’s body swinging from a rope just off the parade grounds. An apparent suicide is not unheard of in a harsh regimen like West Point’s, but the next morning, an even greater horror comes to light. Someone has stolen into the room where the body lay and removed the heart.
At a loss for answers and desperate to avoid any negative publicity, the Academy calls on the services of a local civilian, Augustus Landor, a former police detective who acquired some renown during his years in New York City before retiring to the Hudson Highlands for his health. Now a widower, and restless in his seclusion, Landor agrees to take on the case. As he questions the dead man’s acquaintances, he finds an eager assistant in a moody, intriguing young cadet with a penchant for drink, two volumes of poetry to his name, and a murky past that changes from telling to telling. The cadet’s name? Edgar Allan Poe.
Impressed with Poe’s astute powers of observation, Landor is convinced that the poet may prove useful—if he can stay sober long enough to put his keen reasoning skills to the task. Working in close contact, the two men -- separated by years but alike in intelligence -- develop a surprisingly deep rapport as their investigation takes them into a hidden world.
At West Point Academy in 1830, the calm of an October evening is shattered by the discovery of a young cadet’s body swinging from a rope just off the parade grounds. An apparent suicide is not unheard of in a harsh regimen like West Point’s, but the next morning, an even greater horror comes to light. Someone has stolen into the room where the body lay and removed the heart.
At a loss for answers and desperate to avoid any negative publicity, the Academy calls on the services of a local civilian, Augustus Landor, a former police detective who acquired some renown during his years in New York City before retiring to the Hudson Highlands for his health. Now a widower, and restless in his seclusion, Landor agrees to take on the case. As he questions the dead man’s acquaintances, he finds an eager assistant in a moody, intriguing young cadet with a penchant for drink, two volumes of poetry to his name, and a murky past that changes from telling to telling. The cadet’s name? Edgar Allan Poe.
Impressed with Poe’s astute powers of observation, Landor is convinced that the poet may prove useful—if he can stay sober long enough to put his keen reasoning skills to the task. Working in close contact, the two men -- separated by years but alike in intelligence -- develop a surprisingly deep rapport as their investigation takes them into a hidden world.
Publication
Harper (2006), Edition: First Edition, 432 pages
Original publication date
2007-06-12
Collection
Media reviews
Bayard reinvigorates historical fiction, rendering the 19th century as if he'd witnessed it firsthand.
"The Pale Blue Eye" is not quite the unalloyed delight of Bayard's first Victorian thriller, "Mr. Timothy" (in part because of its melancholy setting and principal characters), but it's just as gracefully written, from its descriptions of the river, "glassy, opal-gray, crumpling into a million
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billows," to the author's unostentatious fidelity to the language and mores of the period. Show Less
Despite all this hugely accomplished and well-observed character study, the detective story that is meant to act as a framework for the book just doesn't match up to the style and quality of the prose.