The Man Who Was Poe

The Man Who Was Poe is a 1991 historical mystery for younger readers by the American author Avi, set in Providence, Rhode Island in 1848. Edmund, an eleven-year-old whose family has vanished, asks Edgar Allan Poe to find them, and the writer takes the case because the material is exactly what his own fiction trades in.

Avi writes for younger readers, and the book is a historical mystery rather than a fantasy, so its materials are period detail, a child's limited authority and an adult whose interest in the case is not purely charitable. The book's premise is a doubled story: a real disappearance that resembles the plots Poe writes, and a child who has almost no authority of his own in a city that will not take him seriously. Avi keeps the reader close to Edmund's limited point of view, so the reader knows less than the investigator does, and Providence in 1848 supplies the docks, the fog and the small-town talk that make the mystery work. The case is set in Providence in 1848, and the year supplies the docks, the weather and the small-town talk without needing a wider historical frame.