I feel guilty about the savaging I’m about to deliver to the novel Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave. It’s clearly a labor of love. Musgrave attempts to craft a mystery in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, in which his hero, post-Civil War detective Pat O’Malley, seeks to learn the truth of Poe’s own death back in 1849, when he was found apparently drunk and dying on the streets of Baltimore.

Pat O’Malley is a decorated Union Army veteran working as a private detective in New York City. Because he knew and liked the poet Poe, and because he happens to be renting the cottage where Poe once lived with his doomed young wife, O’Malley decides to investigate the reported circumstances of his death (which were indeed questionable). He interrogates a series of Poe’s associates and acquaintances (including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and begins to suspect a cruel plot. This puts him in danger for his life.

Poe’s style invites imitation, but I would suggest that he is one of the writers the modern author would be well advised to avoid imitating. Anyone who has read his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” knows that he worked very hard to select precisely the word he needed to express the idea and the feeling he intended. Frankly, most modern writers (perhaps even me) lack the vocabulary to write in Poe’s style. Jim Musgrave most certainly does. The infelicities abound – “It throbbed like a hellish demon…” (Are there other kinds of demons?) “The loud steam whistle blared out…” (Things that blare are pretty much always loud.) “He wore a silk frock coat, in the style of the Victorian era…” (What else would you expect in a Victorian story?) And my personal favorite: He describes one character has having “willowy red hair.”

Although our hero Pat O’Malley generally goes about armed, the passages having to do with firearms clearly reveal a lack of familiarity with them. One does not carry a big Colt Army revolver easily in the top of one’s boot, and if one does (especially with trouser legs covering them, as seems to be the case here) it would be extremely clumsy to get at. And if I understand what O’Malley tells us about how he modified his rare LeMat revolver, he seems to have rigged it to fire off all its bullets, plus the charge in the integral shotgun barrel, all at once. In the first place this would effectively render a revolver a one-shot weapon, which defeats the point of a revolver. Secondly, the bullet in the chamber in the six o’clock position would strike the revolver frame, blowing it up.

The final insult, however, for me, was how the author betrayed Poe’s approach to writing mysteries. Poe essentially invented the mystery story, and he did not mix the supernatural or the irrational in when he wrote in that genre. His detective, C. Auguste Dupin, always relied solely on logical deduction – what he called “ratiocination.” But Pat O’Malley achieves his great breakthrough through having sexual congress with a demimondaine friend, explaining that this allows him to “get in touch with his feminine side” and so solve the mystery through intuition.

Also the climax involves a wholly unwarranted negative deus ex machina.

Really, this is a very bad novel. I do not recommend it.