In his novel The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl examines the circumstances of Edgar Allan Poe’s actual demise in 1849. Pearl mingles real people in Poe’s life with fictional characters (you can’t tell the ...

Click here to read more from Slate’s “Pulp Fiction” week. In The Dante Club, Pearl wrote about a real club—whose members included such heavily bearded worthies as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and James ...

I picked up Matthew Pearl's "The Poe Shadow" partly because I was born and raised in Baltimore, and the tiny cemetery where Edgar Allan Poe is buried was directly behind the hotel my father managed.

Here's a tip for any novelist with an eye on posterity: if you want to ensure posthumous interest, create a bit of blank space in your diary. Disappear for a while, and don't tell anyone where you're ...

Fans of Pearl's bestselling debut, The Dante Club (2003), will eagerly embrace his second novel, a compelling thriller centered on the mysterious end of Edgar Allan Poe, who perished in Baltimore in ...

Pearl's second historical thriller involving literary figures (after 2003's The Dante Club) is set in 1849, when young lawyer Quentin Clark's desire to burnish the tarnished reputation of his favorite ...