Found delirious outside a Baltimore tavern in someone else's clothes, the master of mystery left behind the greatest unsolved case in American literature
BALTIMORE, 7 October 1849 - Edgar Allan Poe, the man who gave the world detective fiction, the horror short story and a talking raven, died on a Sunday morning in a Baltimore hospital aged forty. The circumstances of his last week have never been explained. He'd left Richmond for Philadelphia and New York, and somehow ended up in Baltimore, half-conscious, in a state that no one has been able to diagnose in the century and three-quarters since. If he'd written it as a story, the critics would have called it contrived.
The Last Known Sighting
On 3 October 1849, a printer named Joseph Walker found Poe sprawled outside Gunner's Hall, a tavern on East Lombard Street that was doubling as a polling place for an election that day. Poe was delirious, barely able to speak and dressed in a shabby, ill-fitting suit that clearly wasn't his own. Walker wrote to a friend of Poe's, Dr Joseph Snodgrass, saying that the poet was in great distress and needed immediate assistance. Poe was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he lay in a fevered haze for four days. He was never able to explain what had happened. His last words, according to the attending physician, were "Lord, help my poor soul." You can read the standard account in the article on Edgar Allan Poe.
The Theories: A Reader's Guide to the Mystery
Over the years, researchers have offered a suspiciously long list of explanations, each more colourful than the last. Alcohol is the obvious one, and was the verdict of his critics at the time, though the doctor who treated him denied that he'd been drinking when he arrived. Others have proposed rabies, a theory suggested by a Baltimore physician in the 1990s, who pointed to Poe's difficulty swallowing water in his final days. There is a brain tumour theory, a diabetes theory, a heart-disease theory, and a carbon monoxide theory involving the gas lamps of the era. Another popular idea is that Poe was a victim of "cooping", a form of election fraud in which gangs kidnapped voters, drugged them and forced them to vote repeatedly, often in different clothes. It would explain the borrowed suit, and the fact that it was election day.
What a Modern Hospital Would Have Done
Suppose Poe were found today, confused and agitated, outside a pub in Baltimore. An ambulance would take him to an emergency department, where the doctors would run a battery of tests. They'd check his blood sugar and alcohol level, run a toxicology screen, take a CT scan of his head and test for infection. If it was rabies, they would almost certainly have been too late, since the disease is nearly always fatal once symptoms begin. But if it was any of the other candidates, from a bleed to an infection to a bad reaction to alcohol, a modern doctor would have had an answer in a few hours. The mystery would have been solved before the first coffee.
The Frustrated Detective
It's a grim irony that the inventor of the modern detective story left a mystery nobody can solve. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", published in 1841, Poe created C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth who solves crimes by observation and logic, a template that later inspired Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Holmes, openly acknowledged his debt. You can read about Poe's influence on crime fiction in the Britannica biography of Edgar Allan Poe. And yet here is Poe himself, the victim in the greatest unsolved case in American letters, with every clue lost: the hospital records have gone, the death certificate has vanished, and the doctor's own accounts contradict each other.
If Sherlock Holmes Had Taken the Case
You can imagine how it would go. Holmes arrives at Gunner's Hall, examines the muddy pavement, and points out that the victim's hat is a cheap, worn model, clearly not his own. He deduces from the lack of an umbrella that the poet had been out for some time, and concludes with a flourish that the culprit was "a man of eminent respectability, with a grudge against Baltimore". Watson, who is taking notes, asks for clarification. Holmes sighs. "Watson, it's election day. I'd say the answer was a gang of thugs." Watson blinks. "That's more or less what the history books say already." "Yes," says Holmes. "And I've still had to wear the hat."
The Poet Who Kept Writing
It's worth remembering how productive Poe was, despite everything. By the time of his death he had written "The Raven", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Fall of the House of Usher" and dozens of tales that continue to terrify schoolchildren. He'd also been a ferocious literary critic, a magazine editor and a would-be publisher. Poverty dogged him all his life, and his wife Virginia had died of tuberculosis two years earlier, a loss from which he never quite recovered. A modern doctor might well have spotted the depression, the drinking and the stress, and offered the support Poe never received. The Poe Museum in Richmond still preserves many of his belongings and manuscripts, which at least have been catalogued.
What If Poe Had Lived?
He was only forty. He was planning to relaunch his own magazine, The Stylus, and had just been to Richmond to court a widow, Elmira Shelton, whom he'd known in his youth. A longer-lived Poe might have finally found a measure of financial security, and perhaps a little contentment. He might have written more stories, more poems, more criticism, and more savage letters to his enemies. Perhaps he'd even have reached the age of Dickens, who outlived him by two decades. Instead, the world got a legend, which, for the literary industry, is far more profitable.
The Verdict: A Tragedy That Might Have Been Treatable
With a modern ambulance and a toxicology lab, Poe would have been diagnosed within hours, and with luck cured within days. The real tragedy is the lost decades. Poe died with his best work behind him and his reputation in tatters, and it fell to his posthumous fans to repair it. For a man who loved a good mystery, his own ending was a masterpiece of dramatic irony. We'd gladly swap it for a few more years of his scowling company.
Humorous Observations
- The greatest mystery writer in America died in circumstances so mysterious that a thousand fans still argue about them.
- Being found in someone else's clothes is the oldest excuse in the Baltimore book.
- The raven would have made an excellent witness, but all it ever said was "nevermore".
- If the cooping theory is right, Poe was a victim of early voter fraud, which makes him the first literary casualty of the ballot box.
- A man who invented the detective story would have appreciated a better filing system for his own death certificate.
- Sherlock Holmes would solve it in three pipes and mock the doctors for missing it.
- If Poe had lived, he'd have been sued by half of New York for his reviews.
- Every theory is plausible, and every theory is unprovable, which is the most Poe-like thing about it. https://prat.uk/?p=51090
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