The (Still) Mysterious Death Of Edgar Allan Poe

As Halloween again approaches, Natasha Geiling at the Smithsonian magazine offers a look back at the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe. 

It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby secondhand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious and unable to move, but as Walker approached him, he discovered something unexpected: The man was Edgar Allan Poe. 

 …On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond, Virginia, bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Marguerite St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th century, again—and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for "Reynolds"—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery. 

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a brief video via the link below: 

The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

You can also read my Philadelphia Weekly Crime Beat column on Poe in Philadelphia via the link below:

Paul Davis On Crime: Poe In Philadelphia: My Philadelphia Weekly 'Crime Beat' Column On Edgar Allan Poe's Creative Peak In Philly 

On This Day In History: Herman Melville’s Great American Novel, ‘Moby-Dick,’ Only Got Mixed Reviews When It First Hit Bookstores

Eli Wizevich at Smithsonian magazine offers a piece on Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick:  

November 14, 1851, marked the first day that the American public could purchase Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, the latest novel by the modestly successful author Herman Melville, for $1.50 (around $60 today).

At the time, Melville already had five books to his name. Several, including Typee, Omoo and White-Jacket, drew on his experiences living and traveling at sea. His third, Mardi, flirted with romance and deeper philosophy but lacked overall coherence, critics said.5heMysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe Skip Ad

Moby-Dick, which Melville wrote mainly at his Arrowhead estate in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, masterfully married his deep personal experience and research on whaling tales with philosophy, natural science and revelatory biblical prose. In late June 1850, the novelist proposed the partially written novel to his British publisher, Richard Bentley, and promised that he would have it completed by “the latter part of the coming autumn.”

But the writing process took much longer than expected. Moby-Dick was becoming a whale of a book, dense with detail, emotion and plot. To make matters worse, Melville’s American publisher, Harper & Brothers, refused to give him an advance because he still owed the company money from past book deals.

Melville sought loans from friends to sustain himself through another year of writing. To expedite the publishing process and hopefully limit editorial changes, he opted to typeset and copy-edit Moby-Dick independently while he was still writing later sections of the book.

Finally, in the fall of 1851—a year behind schedule—Moby-Dick was ready for publication. Bentley released the first British edition, titled The Whale, on October 18. Harper & Brothers, notwithstanding Melville’s debt, published the first American edition of Moby-Dick on November 14.

In total, the British first edition was 2,000 words shorter than the American one, despite being published in an ornate three-volume set. Bentley only ordered 500 copies of The Whale—significantly lower than the number printed for Melville’s earlier efforts. Harper & Brothers, meanwhile, printed 2,915 copies of Moby-Dick. The American publisher’s printings of Melville’s previous novels ranged from just over 3,000 to roughly 4,000 copies.

The quality of the single-volume edition of Melville’s latest book attracted some scorn. The New Bedford, Massachusetts, Daily Mercury, the hometown paper of the American whaling industry, called it “a bulky, queer-looking volume, in some respects ‘very like a whale’ even in outward appearance.”

The response to the content of the book itself was similarly lukewarm. The Hartford Courant, in a review, wrote that Moby-Dick somewhat confoundingly straddled the line between fiction and nonfiction. Nevertheless, the reviewer added, “It is well worth reading as a book of amusement.”

To many literary critics, Moby-Dick was simply an adventure tale, not even a patricianly sensational one at that, and certainly not a work of fine literature. A review in the Springfield Daily Republican politely noted Melville’s “quaint though interesting style.”

Reviewers’ apathy was reflected in the novel’s sales figures. Three years after Moby-Dick’s release, the first American printing had still not sold out.

Only some contemporary reviews offered a glimpse of the success and admiration that Moby-Dick would earn in the decades after Melville’s death in 1891. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville’s neighbor and friend, to whom the text is dedicated, reproached one negative review with a simple exclamation: “What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones.” 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 Herman Melville's Great American Novel, 'Moby-Dick,' Only Got Mixed Reviews When It First Hit Bookstores | Smithsonian 

Benjamin Franklin Was The Nation’s First Newsman

Smithsonian magazine offers an excerpt from Adam Smyth’s book, The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives.

The excerpt covers America’s first newsman, Ben Franklin.    

Before he helped launch a revolution, Benjamin Franklin was colonial America’s leading editor and printer of novels, almanacs, soap wrappers, and everything in between.

Ben Franklin was, in his own words, “the youngest son of the youngest son for five Generations back.” Born to a Boston candlemaker who had emigrated from Ecton, England, Franklin became an American printer of national significance: the editor and publisher, at 23, of what became his nation’s most important newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. An internationally lauded scientist of electricity, he broke through the frosty anteroom of London’s Royal Society—a colonial autodidact!—to become a celebrated fellow. A prolific humorist, he invented a tradition of wry, plain-speaking wit (among his pseudonyms: Margaret Aftercast and Ephraim Censorious).

He was the author of one of the only pre-19th-century American best sellers still read today (his Autobiography). A Pennsylvanian politician and civic reformer of tireless energy. Founder of the Junto, a self-improvement society; of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in North America; of the American Philosophical Society; of the Union Fire Company; of the University of Pennsylvania. The author of essays on phonetic alphabets, demography, paper currency. A leader of resistance to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed taxes on colonial legal documents and printed materials, and, ultimately, to British colonial rule of America. Grand master of the Masons, Pennsylvania. The deputy postmaster general of North America and, eventually, postmaster general of the United States.

…The medium Franklin moved in was ink: He waded in it, up to his neck. The printing trade was his start, the profession that made him. While Franklin grew up at a time when printing in colonial America was not yet established, the trade was coiled like a spring, and his timing was right; to a considerable extent, Franklin released it. The first printing press in the British colonies was not established until 1638, when locksmith Stephen Daye sailed from Cambridge, England, to Massachusetts, carrying a press in pieces. In 1722, when Franklin was 16, there were just four cities in Britain’s North American colonies with presses, and only eight printing shops in all: five in Boston and one each in Philadelphia, New York, and New London, Connecticut. The Boston News-Letter started its publication in 1704; it was the only newspaper in the colonies for the next 15 years.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

Benjamin Franklin Was the Nation’s First Newsman | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)

The Real History Behind FX's 'Shogun'

Molly Solly at the Smithsonian magazine offers a piece on the story behind Shogun.

When a powerful Japanese feudal lord with aspirations of seizing control of the warring nation learned that a ragged group of European sailors had landed on the archipelago’s southern shores in April 1600, he was eager to arrange a meeting with their leader. 

The outsiders, Tokugawa Ieyasu believed, could be of assistance in his grand plan. With the Dutch ship’s captain too ill to move, the crew sent English navigator William Adams in his place.

“Coming before [Ieyasu], he viewed me well and seemed to be wonderfully favorable,” wrote Adams in a letter to his wife. “I showed unto him the name of our country, and that our land long sought out the East Indies, and desired friendship with all kings and potentates in way of merchandise, having in our land diverse commodities which these lands had not.

Impressed by Adams’ diplomatic overtures, Ieyasu ignored the advice of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who urged him to execute the Protestant interloper. Instead, the warlord took Adams into his confidence. Over the next several years, as Ieyasu consolidated power under the newly established Tokugawa shogunate, he treated Adams as a trusted adviser, rewarding him with land, money and other honors.

While Adams’ relationship with Ieyasu was far from the most consequential in Japan’s history of European relations, the pair’s novelty and unlikely dynamic had a comparatively outsized cultural impact. This story of the first Englishman to visit Japan has inspired an array of dramatic works, most notably James Clavell’s 1975 best-selling novel, Shogun, and its 1980 mini-series adaptation, which became a nationwide sensation in the United States.

Forty-four years after the “Shogun” mini-series earned NBC its highest Nielsen ratings yet, a new version offers a contemporary twist on the tale. As Gina Balian, co-president of FX Entertainment, tells Variety, “When you’re taking on an adaptation of something that’s already been adapted, there has to be a reason why.” She adds, “We got more comfortable with needing to tell [the story] as much from the Japanese side, casting Japanese-speaking actors. We evolved as the project evolved.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

The Real History Behind FX's 'Shogun' | History | Smithsonian Magazine

You can also read my previous post on Shogun via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At James Clavell's 'Shogun' 

Wheresoever She Was, There Was Eden: For Mark Twain, It Was Love At First Sight When He Saw A Photo of Olivia Langton

Richard Gunderman at the Smithsonian magazine offers a piece on Mark Twain and his wife Olivia.

The year 2018 marks the 150th anniversary of one of the great courtships in American history, the wooing of an unenthusiastic 22-year-old Olivia Langdon by a completely smitten 32-year-old Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

As I first learned while visiting Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri in preparation for teaching “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the contrasts between the two were indeed stark, and the prospects for their eventual union exceedingly poor. Olivia Langdon, known as Livy, was a thoroughly proper easterner, while Sam was a rugged man of the West. Livy came from a family that was rich and well-educated, while Sam had grown up poor and left school at age 12. She was thoroughly pious, while he was a man who knew how to smoke, drink and swear.

On Valentine’s Day, their story is a reminder of the true meaning of love. Despite many challenges, once united, they never gave up on each other and enjoyed a fulfilling 34 years of marriage.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-mark-twain-it-was-love-at-first-sight-180968141/?utm_source=smithsoniantopic&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20170218-Weekender&spMailingID=33107506&spUserID=NzQwNDU4NTg2NjMS1&spJobID=1222047727&spReportId=MTIyMjA0NzcyNwS2 

What Was the Inspiration for Agatha Christie's “The Murder on the Orient Express”?

Although I’m not a fan of Agatha Christie (seen in the below photo) and “cozy” murder mysteries in general, I was interested in reading Natale Escobar's piece on the backstory of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express in the Smithsonian magazine.  

In Agatha Christie’s crime novel Murder on the Orient Express, the well-mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot solves the grisly stabbing of an American tycoon traveling on a long-distance passenger train. While the 1934 story, adapted for a new movie, of murder and revenge on a stuck, snowed-in train is of course a work of fiction, Christie pulled parts of her story straight from the headlines.

In Christie’s story, Poirot is on the Orient Express, from Syria to London, when a man named Ratchett asks Poirot to investigate the death threats he’s been receiving. Poirot declines, telling Ratchett he doesn’t like his face. The next morning, a snowdrift stops the train in its tracks, and Ratchett is found stabbed to death in his compartment.

When Poirot steps back into his detective role and searches Ratchett’s compartment for clues, he finds a scrap of burnt paper that reads “–member little Daisy Armstrong.” He deduces that Ratchett is really a mobster named Cassetti, who kidnapped the 3-year-old heiress Daisy Armstrong and collected $200,000 in ransom from her parents before her dead body was discovered. A wealthy man, he was able to escape conviction and flee the country. The narrative of the book centers around who on the train murdered Ratchett.

Daisy Armstrong’s fictional case probably rang familiar to readers in the mid-1930s, who had followed national coverage of the kidnapping of the baby son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Christie’s official website confirms that the author lifted the idea for the subplot from the true-life tragedy. On March 1, 1932, the 20-month-old child disappeared from his crib. A ransom note affixed to the nursery window of their New Jersey home demanded $50,000.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-was-inspiration-murder-orient-express-180967305/ 

Note: The Lindbergh backstory makes the novel/film more interesting.

I've never been much of an Agatha Christie fan but I read the book in 1974 or 75 while I was in the Navy in Scotland just before I saw the Sidney Lumet, Albert Finney, Sean Connery Murder On The Orient Express film.

I was about to watch a film at the theater in Glasgow when the Murder On the Orient Express film was advertised on screen.

My Scottish girlfriend asked me if I wanted to see it and I said no.

She said she was surprised, as I was interested in crime and I was a fan of the great Scot actor, Sean Connery.

Yes, and I like the director, Sidney Lumet, I told her.

But I don't like these kinds of murder mysteries, as I always guess the murderer right off the bat.

She challenged me to do so and we agreed to see the film the following week.

The next day I bought the book.

I thought I would discover who the murderer was in the book and then point out the guilty character as he or she appeared on the screen.

Good plan?

Spoiler Alert!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you have not read the book or seen the previous films, don't read any further!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  

Well, as one may know if one has read the book or seen the films, everyone of the characters had a hand in killing the victim.

I had to confess to my girlfriend. She called me a "Cheeky bastard." 

A Private Tour Of The CIA's Incredible Museum

David Wise, a veteran journalist and author of numerous books on espionage, offers an interesting piece on the CIA's spy museum for Smithsonian magazine.

A chill wind whipped off the Warnow as a retired railroad worker shuffled through the streets of the port city of Rostock one winter night in 1956. He wore the drab clothes typical of East German residents. But when a second man appeared from the shadows, the elderly German revealed that he was wearing a pair of distinctive gold cuff links embossed with the helmet of the Greek goddess Athena and a small sword.

The second man wore an identical pair. Wordlessly, he handed the German a package of documents and retreated back into the shadows. The German caught a train for East Berlin, where he handed the package and the cuff links to a CIA courier. The courier smuggled them to the agency’s base in West Berlin—to George Kisevalter, who was on his way to becoming a legendary CIA case officer.

The man who retreated back into the shadows was Lt. Col. Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, an officer of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. Three years earlier, Popov had dropped a note into an American diplomat’s car in Vienna saying, “I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services.” He was the CIA’s first Soviet mole, and Kisevalter was his handler. Popov became one of the CIA’s most important sources through the 1950s, turning over a trove of Soviet military secrets that included biographical details on 258 of his fellow GRU officers.

It was Kisevalter who had decided on the cuff links as a recognition signal. He gave them to Popov before Moscow recalled the GRU officer in 1955, along with instructions: If Popov ever made it out of the USSR again and renewed contact with the CIA, whoever the agency sent to meet him would wear a matching set to establish his bona fides.

Popov renewed contact after he was assigned to Schwerin, East Germany, and the cuff links worked as intended. He fed Kisevalter information through the retired railroad worker for another two years. But after Popov was recalled to Moscow in 1958, he was arrested by the KGB. There are various theories on why he fell under suspicion. However, in a series of interviews two decades ago, Kisevalter told me it was the result of a botched signal: He said George Payne Winters Jr., a State Department officer working for the CIA in Moscow, “got the instruction backward” and mistakenly mailed a letter addressed to Popov at his home. The KGB spotted him in the act and fished the letter out of the mailbox. Popov was doomed.

The Soviets expelled Winters from Moscow in 1960, the same year they executed Popov—by firing squad, Kisevalter believed. He told biographer Clarence Ashley he doubted a rumor that Popov had been thrown alive into a furnace as a lesson to other GRU officers, who were required to watch.

Today, the cuff links rest in one of the most compelling and least visited museums in the United States. The museum has an extraordinary collection of spy gadgets, weapons and espionage memorabilia from before World War II to the present—more than 28,000 items, of which 18,000 have been cataloged—and hundreds are on display.

But the museum is run by the CIA and housed at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, eight miles outside Washington, D.C. The agency’s entire campus is off-limits to the public, and the museum is open only to CIA employees, their families and visitors on agency business.

By special arrangement, Smithsonian magazine was allowed to tour the museum, take notes and photograph select exhibits. Our guide through the looking glass was Toni Hiley, the museum’s director. “Every day, CIA officers help to shape the course of world events,” Hiley said. “The CIA has a rich history, and our museum is where we touch that history.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/private-tour-cias-incredible-museum-180952738/?no-ist

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine interview with David Wise via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2011/08/q-with-david-wise-author-of-tiger-trap.html

Mark Twain And Bermuda

The Bermuda web site Bernews.com offers a piece on Mark Twain and "Our Friends the Bermudians."

Along with such works as Marco Polo’s account of his journey to China, Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” — among the first publications to introduce Bermuda to Americans as a holiday destination —  has been named as one of the top travel books ever written by a Smithsonian Institution writer.

“Smithsonian Magazine” contributor Tony Perrottet this month [Mar. 20] ranked “The Innocents Abroad” — Mark Twain’s account of an 1867 “Great Pleasure Excursion” on board the chartered vessel “Quaker City” through Europe and the Holy Land — as fourth on what he calls a “brazenly opinionated short-list of travel classics .. that have inspired armchair travellers to venture out of their comfort zone and hit the road.”

Bermuda was the last port of call on the five-month “Quaker City” voyage, among the first extended pleasure cruises of its kind ever undertaken.

Mark Twain [1835–1910] — then a journalist and commentator — joined the “Quaker City” cruise with the intentions of sending back dispatches about his travels to various newspapers.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://bernews.com/2013/03/mark-twain-our-friends-the-bermudians/

I've long been an admirer of Mark Twain and I've also become a fan of Bermuda, having taken a cruise to the beautiful island last October.

You can read my previous post on Bermuda and view a few photos via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/10/ahead-of-storm-cruise-to-bermuda.html