My eye sockets feel as if someone is pressing a thumb against them.
There’s no more than a sliver of moon to light the way, and my legs are heavy and my hands are numb. Without a second’s more hesitation now, he sets his foot on the first length of pipe and, finding it secure, lowers himself to the next level. Take this passage, in which the narrator Dr Carpentier and Charles, who may or may not be the Dauphin grown up, are escaping a pursuer by climbing out of a window: While Bayard can certainly spin a tale, a lot of the pleasure of his books is in his slightly off-centre prose, which frequently makes confident and able use of vivid imagery. As it turns out, he is involved, although not quite as directly as first appears, and so he’s drawn into an investigation that centres on his late father’s treatment-and possible rescue-of Louis XVII, the “Lost Dauphin”, believed to have died in prison as a child. The story is narrated by a Dr Hector Carpentier, into whose world Vidocq makes a suitably dramatic entrance, accusing the doctor of involvement in a murder. In his new novel, The Black Tower, Bayard turns his attention to the French Restoration and the exploits of real-life criminal-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq.
Both novels had a lot to recommend them in particular, The Pale Blue Eye was a more entertaining book than 2006’s other Poe-inspired yarn, Matthew Pearl’s disappointing The Poe Shadow (which was published on the same day and as a result must have drawn at least some of the limelight from Bayard’s novel). Timothy (2003) followed the continuing adventures of Timothy Cratchit from A Christmas Carol, while The Pale Blue Eye (2006) was set around West Point Military Academy and featured a young cadet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe. and New York Times critic Louis Bayard has spent the last few years carving out a niche for himself as a writer of historical crime stories featuring real-life individuals and characters from classic fiction.
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