The American Boy

illustrious old boy and, in 1878, published his memory of those conversations. Mr Bransby was reluctant to talk about Poe, perhaps because of the way he had been portrayed in 'William Wilson'. But he is reported as saying: 'Edgar Allan was a quick and clever boy and would have been a very good boy if he had not been spoilt by his parents, but they spoilt him, and allowed him an extravagant amount of pocket money, which enabled him to get into all manner of mischief – still, I liked the boy – poor fellow, his parents spoilt him!' On another occasion Mr Bransby added: 'Allan was intelligent, wayward and wilful.'

John Allan's firm continued to suffer from financial difficulties. On 2nd October 1819, Allan's landlord in Southampton Row dunned him for rent. But Allan was still willing and able to pay Edgar's school bills – the last one that survives is for 26th May 1820. On 16th June 1820 the Allans and their foster son sailed for New York aboard the Martha from Liverpool. The American boy was going home.

Lafayette did indeed visit Baltimore in 1824, where he asked after his old comrade and called on Edgar Allan Poe's grandmother. According to a later account in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum (4th March 1843), the General knelt beside the grave of David Poe, Senior, and said, 'Ici repose un coeur noble!' A few weeks later Lafayette was in Richmond, where Edgar's friend Thomas Ellis recorded his pride in seeing Edgar among the distinguished visitor's guard of honour.

Edgar Allan Poe's life began with the mystery of his father's disappearance and ended with the mystery of his own. The account given in the Appendix to The American Boy is substantially accurate. No one knows where Poe was between 26th September and 3rd October 1849. When he reappeared in Baltimore, he had lost his money and he was wearing cheap, dirty clothes which were not his own; but he was still carrying a malacca cane he had borrowed from a Richmond acquaintance.

The most detailed evidence, and probably the most reliable, comes from the earliest accounts of Joseph Snodgrass, the friend who rescued Poe, and of Dr Moran, the physician who attended him in his last illness. Neither was an unbiased witness. Snodgrass was an ardent Temperance campaigner and regarded the story of his friend's death as an illustration of the perils of alcohol. Moran was one of Poe's posthumous supporters, and his story became increasingly embroidered as the years went by. However, he wrote the passage quoted only a few weeks after Poe's death; it uses the plainest language of all his accounts; it mentions both Poe's cries for 'Reynolds' and his desire for death. Moran is also the earliest source for the suggestion that when Poe arrived in Baltimore he fell in with 'some of his old and former associates'.

Several theories have been advanced to explain Poe's condition. The main ones are: the effects of alcoholism; 'cooping' – a violent electioneering practice which involved intoxicating voters and then forcing them to vote repeatedly; and – an imaginative late entry into the field – the bite of a rabid dog. They are no more than theories.

After his death, as Poe's reputation continued to grow, the facts of his doomed and mysterious life continued to be obscured by the enthusiastic modifications of his many supporters and detractors. His work has found admirers all over the world, including Abraham Lincoln and Josef Stalin.

Anyone wishing to know more about him cannot do better than to start with Arthur Hobson Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1941 and still the best biography available. A hoard of essential biographical source material relating to Poe has been assembled in The Poe Log (1987) by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson. Finally, the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland, maintains an admirable website at http://www.eapoe.org/: scholarly, detailed and well-organised, it is a pleasure to use.

About the author

'My children make jokes about my unhealthy relationship with the Oxford English Dictionary.'

Life at a glance.

Born: 1951, Ely, East Anglia.

Educated: Cambridge University; University College London.

Career: After stints as a librarian and editor, Taylor turned to full-time writing in 1981. He has written over twenty books, including Caroline Minuscule, his first novel, which won the John Creasey Memorial Award; the Roth Trilogy (now published together in one volume as Requiem for an Angel), the last novel of which, The Office of the Dead, won the CWA's Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award in 2001; The Barred Window, a highly regarded contemporary psychological thriller; and, of course, The American Boy, winner of 2003's CWA Historical Dagger Award.

ANDREW TAYLOR WRITES his chilling crime novels in a converted outbuilding near the cosy, straggling Victorian cottage that he shares with his wife and two children. He lives in a small town in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. 'I've lived in the Forest longer than I've lived anywhere else,' says Andrew, 'and I love it. I think that if we'd stayed in London, or any other big city, our social lives and our work lives would revolve solely around literature and publishing. But here we've got friends from all walks of life.' A self-confessed writing and word 'addict', he is the author of 'twenty plus books, at a conservative estimate' and the recipient of two Ellis Peters Historical Daggers (for The Office of the Dead and The American Boy) and a John Creasey Memorial Award for his debut novel Caroline Minuscule). 'My children make jokes about my unhealthy relationship with the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the pleasures of writing The American Boy was the need to check words and phrases to see if they could reasonably be used, and in the sense I wanted, in 1819- 20.'

Andrew was born in 1951 and grew up in Ely, the cathedral city in the Fens, a version of which (Rosington) is the setting for several of his novels, and appears briefly in The American Boy as the town where Tom Shield grew up. 'The Fens are so incredibly monotonous, but that landscape is part of me, as is Ely and the cathedral. These things go very, very deep. I've not dared to go back for twenty years because it won't be the same, everything will have changed. It's safer in the memory.'

At his Suffolk boarding school he escaped into books. 'I binged on reading. In one school report my house- master said that the sooner I grew out of inventing stories and acting them out with my friends, the better.' He adds: 'If you go to a boarding school, especially an old-fashioned one, it can have unexpected effects. I think it's a climate that made fantasy and story flourish because you had to have some sort of outlet from the repression.' With Andrew's natural inclination for melodrama there was 'usually the odd corpse, the odd murder' even in his schoolboy plays, and he places the blame firmly on Enid Blyton's Noddy, the first 'crime' book he can remember reading. 'Hurrah for Little Noddy was Enid Blyton's groundbreaking expose of police incompetence and gang culture among goblins in the fast set. It has red herrings, a wrongful arrest and a thrilling car chase. Big Ears puts in some solid detective work too.' According to Andrew, at some point in the near future someone will publish a PhD thesis on the influence of Enid Blyton on crime writing in the UK. 'I'm sure a lot of us in my age group had our psyches warped at a very early age.'

Andrew read English at Cambridge. 'I enjoyed discovering authors like Dryden, writers I wouldn't have normally read. I suppose it must have expanded my awareness of what language can do, where literature can go. That said, I don't know if it's of any value to a novelist to have studied English. Somerset Maugham reckoned that the time he spent walking the wards as a doctor taught him more about human nature than any amount of reading could do.' After Cambridge, Andrew had a five-year 'limbo' – travelling and doing all sorts of odd jobs, including those of wages clerk and boat builder, before settling into being a librarian in north-west London. 'Libraries aren't just about books, they're places where people come – there's a great ebb and flow of the public coursing through the doors, often with very real dramas they want to tell you about, or want advice about. I've done all sorts of things from trying to help rape victims to sorting out treatment for sick cats.'