The Real History
My husband told me, as I was finishing the fifth and final book of the Immortal Descendants series, that Edgar Allan Poe had disappeared for five days in 1849. He was found again in Baltimore on October 3rd, delirious and possibly drunk, wearing strange clothes and carrying a cane. He was taken to Gunnar’s Hall where a doctor friend took him to a Baltimore hospital. Poe died four days later, never having regained proper consciousness except to call out for a mysterious person by the name of “Reynolds.”
Of course Poe was a Clocker, and I knew I would write that story someday.
What I didn’t know until I began researching Poe in earnest was how very prevalent the images of clocks and spirals are in his work. I also found a blog post that pointed out several things he wrote about that he shouldn’t have known – like Richard Parker, the 17-year-old cabin boy eaten by his crewmates in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Forty years after that story was written, a boy named Richard Parker really was eaten by shipwrecked crewmates. There is also Poe’s prediction of the origins of the universe in the poem Eureka eighty years before scientists would begin to formulate the Big Bang Theory.
Poe was raised on a Virginia plantation by his wealthy, slave-owning foster parents and has been noted as an anti-abolitionist by scholars who have studied his reviews of books on the subject of slavery. He was disinherited by his foster father and often lived in poverty, just barely able to support himself, his wife, and her mother on what he earned as a writer and editor. The racist imagery and sentiment that can be found in several of his works has been studied at length, and the reversal of his views as depicted in Death’s Door are not supported by anything other than my hopeful imagination.
The practice of ‘cooping’ was notorious and widespread in the late 1840s, and it is put forth as one possibility to explain the five days Poe went missing shortly before his death. Cooping gangs kidnapped poor white men off the streets, beat them, and forced them to drink to insensibility so they could keep them prisoner in ‘coops,’ or cellars, near polling places. They stuffed the men’s pockets full of voting tickets for a certain candidate, and then on voting day, they would roll the men out to the polls, make them vote, then change their clothes and do it again until the men were finally recognized and prevented from further voting.
A scene that was written but didn’t make it into this final version of Death’s Door was set in the Old Baltimore Shot Tower, which I’d never heard of until my husband (who in the time of COVID-19 has also been my research assistant) described the process of making shot for firearms. A person climbed the spiral staircase to the top of the 220-foot-tall tower where they poured molten metal through a sieve. The ‘drops’ fell into a bucket of cold water on the bottom and formed perfectly round balls of ammunition. There were four shot towers in Baltimore, and at one time, this one, which still remains today, was the tallest building in the United States. I’m already planning how to add that scene to Ren’s next Baltimore Mysteries adventure.
All of the facts about Pratt Street, including the locations of slave pens and the names of the men who owned them, are based on old maps and newspapers and are horribly true.
The small detail of front and end pages of books having been cut out for use as notepaper came as the result of research into 1850s letters – forgeries of which have often been made using the blank pages from old books.
Edgar Allan Poe actually did live on Amity Street for a time in his twenties, and he is buried in Baltimore. His first biography was written by a man who considered him a rival. It was not kind. I have written a small chapter in an alternate version, and whether he actually Clocked to the future during his five missing days, I leave to your imagination.
Death’s Door is set in the world of the Immortal Descendants series, which begins with the Library Journal Award-winning Marking Time. There are a few Easter eggs in Death’s Door about some of the Clocker spiral locations, and there is one character in this story who not only appears in the Immortal Descendants series, but will also be found in his own series called A Soul’s Journey, which hasn’t been written yet, but fills my dreams with vivid images of tenth-century assassins.
To find out more about the Immortal Descendants series as well as my other books, please visit my website: http://www.aprilwhitebooks.com.
The Immortal Descendants Series
Marking Time
Tempting Fate
Changing Nature
Waging War
Cheating Death
The Immortal Descendants: Baltimore Mysteries
Death’s Door
The Baker Street Mysteries
An Urchin of Means
The Cipher Security Series
Code of Conduct
Code of Honor