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Advance praise for
The Girl Behind the Wall

Edgar Allan Poe comes to life in this fast-moving, imaginative mystery that puts past and present on a collision course and brings them together with a satisfying impact.
        William Martin, New York Times bestselling author of Back Bay

"Five Stars... If you enjoyed Lost Treasure or Killer Fog (which I did), you will like The Girl Behind the Wall even more--because Wetterau manages to squeeze three terrific mystery stories into one connected narrative...This book is a gem..."
         Bryan Bunch, author of Before Eureka

I am really impressed by the amount of research the author did on Poe...and how he managed to invent a complete plot and insert so many elements of Poe’s life and writings in it. It is honestly brilliant. If you are among readers still hesitating when you know a book is self-published, please put all your hesitations aside. I repeat, the book is brilliant. Please, spread the word!
          Words And Peace Book Review Blog

"A wonderful blend of fact and fiction, The Girl Behind the Wall by Bruce Wetterau intertwines the known facts about Poe’s life with a fictional murder and puts a different spin on Poe’s final months...The writing was great. The first chapter, which takes place in the past, drew me in immediately with a chilling description of one of Poe’s hallucinations. The writing is just as engrossing in the rest of the book, and there were many scenes that had me holding my breath."
          Post by Mbrooks, OnlineBookClub.org

The truth can’t be buried forever. This was a beautifully complex tale, from the ample cast of characters to the interlocking subplots...it was well written and clever. Anyone who is a fan of Edgar Allen Poe should give The Girl Behind the Wall a try.
          Long and Short Reviews, Book Review Blog

THE MYSTERY:
Did Edgar Allan Poe know more about murder than he revealed in his bizarre stories of murder and mayhem? Was he in fact guilty of killing a girlfriend in a fit of rage many years before he became famous?
     Bruce Wetterau’s taut thriller weaves a murder mystery worthy of Poe himself while following Poe through actual events during the last months of his life. The year 1849 saw the real-life Poe dealing with his alcoholism, failing health, poverty, and painful memories of his recently deceased child-bride wife. His life had become a psychological pressure cooker, with severe anxiety attacks and bouts of strange hallucinations.
     The Girl Behind the Wall opens in early 1849. Poe is being tormented by frightening visions about murdering Annabel while he was a student at the University of Virginia. Deathly afraid of the hangman's noose, Poe knows he can never tell anyone about the repressed memories haunting him. But a newspaper reporter named Sam Reynolds has overheard him talking erratically about Annabel while in a drunken stupor. That a man as famous as Poe could be a murderer would be the scoop of a lifetime. Reynolds is determined to get that story at all costs.
     Flash forward nearly two hundred years to the present when the book's hero, Clay Cantrell, accidentally uncovers damning evidence--Annabel’s skeleton and a locket from Poe--behind an old brick wall at the university. While the mystery of Annabel's murder and Poe's strange visions unfolds in flashbacks, Cantrell and friends launch a search of their own for the truth about Annabel's death. But another murder mystery much closer to home overtakes them when a cold-blooded serial killer named the Raven claims his first victim, a UVA coed.
     Obsessed with Poe, the Raven stages his murders with clever ties to Poe’s works. So Clay and friends desperately search Poe’s writings for clues to help stop the murders. Their success draws the Raven's wrath, landing Clay in his cross hairs. Clay, an ex-Army Ranger, isn't afraid though, because this isn't the first vicious killer he's had to fight. But he doesn't know the Raven's conjured up a diabolical plan to execute him.
      Will Poe finally reveal the truth about Annabel to Reynolds, or will he take the secret to his grave? Can Clay escape the Raven’s plot, discover what drives the Raven’s murderous obsession with Poe, and at long last answer the question, did Poe really kill Annabel Lee?


Want to read The Girl Behind the Wall? You can order the book (pre-order before the Oct. 21 release) by clicking on a button below to go directly to the retailer's order page for The Girl Behind the Wall.


TOO COLD TO TOUCH? POE AND THE GIRL BEHIND THE WALL
                                                                   By Bruce Wetterau
 
Reprinted from the Mystery Readers Journal, The Journal of Mystery Readers International,
Vol. 37, Number 4, Winter 2021
 
How would you solve a murder mystery that wasn't discovered by police until a girl's skeleton was unearthed almost two hundred years after the fact? Surely there would be precious little left to go on. Suspects? Could have been just about anybody alive two hundred years ago. Clues? The blowing sands of time certainly would have wind-washed most of them to oblivion. No fingerprints, witness statements, or the other usual touchstones police rely on to catch a murderer. It's a cold case that in real life today probably would remain unsolved forever.

Except it can't. Because that's the goal I set for myself when I decided to write a story about Edgar Allan Poe as the prime suspect in a murder. I'll admit to being fascinated (and a bit torn) by the prospect of pinning suspicions of guilt on the author who penned classic stories of murder and mayhem and who is regarded as the father of the modern detective story. But his reputation begged the question, did he know so much about murder because, well, he'd committed one himself?
  
As a gleam in this author's eye, the idea struck me as deliciously ironic, if not downright deviously speculative. It also promised a multitude of possible allusions to stories Poe wrote and a host of intriguing possible subtexts too. Which is to say, I couldn't resist the idea. But in the early days of planning my novel, the mechanics of constructing the mystery, fitting it into Poe's life, and proving Poe guilty or innocent of a crime so long ago seemed all but impossible. Sometimes I wonder why the heck I make things so hard on myself.

Happily, imagination won out and The Girl Behind the Wall--Edgar Allan Poe, the Girl, and the Mysterious Raven Murders became the third novel in my Clay Cantrell Mystery Series. By design all books in my series weave back and forth between a contemporary plot and a related mystery as it unfolds in the past. So the structure gave me a leg up, allowing me to tell the story of a cold case mystery actually unfolding in the past. Meanwhile, fast forwarding to the present, I follow my amateur sleuth Clay Cantrell as he tries to uncover the truth about this coldest of cases, the murder of Poe's girlfriend, Annabel Lee, in 1826. And just to make things really interesting for this installment of the series, Clay also winds up risking his life to catch a modern-day serial killer who is both obsessed with Poe and may even be connected somehow to Annabel's murder.

Where to begin? That's usually a nagging question for writing a mystery. But from the get-go I knew it had to be with Poe suffering a bout of his strange, recurring vision about killing his girlfriend years before. Equally important in the opening pages was introducing an ambitious newspaper reporter, Sam Reynolds. He will stop at nothing to get the story of a now famous Poe as a murderer. But he has only fragments of a story from Poe himself. He's learned the girl's name and a few shreds of information from Poe's drunken ravings, but he has no murder victim, no witness, and no idea of when the murder took place.

Clay doesn't start off with much more to go on in the present day. He accidentally discovers the victim--now reduced to a desiccated skeleton--walled up behind a failing brick wall in an old tunnel under the University of Virginia Grounds. The obvious effort to hide the girl's body points to murder, of course. And a single, crucial clue makes Poe a possible suspect. A locket around the bones of Annabel's neck is inscribed "My beloved Annabel. Your devoted Eddy. Oct. 1826".  The tantalizing possibility here is that the "Eddy" is Poe himself, that Annabel was his girlfriend when he was a student at the university. Could his walling her up have inspired Poe's famous story The Cask of Amontillado, if in fact he did kill her? The local police aren't interested in investigating a case so cold--it's too cold to touch--especially with a serial killer then on the loose in the town. But the case arouses Clay's curiosity, setting the second half of my mystery in motion.

I won't spoil the story by revealing how Clay and his friends, or for that matter reporter Sam Reynolds, fare in discovering the truth about Annabel's murder. But perhaps it will be enough here to explain how I came up with the idea of making Poe a murder suspect in the first place--a look into the sometimes quirky events an author's imagination builds on.
 
It's hard not to be at least passingly familiar with Edgar Allan Poe, of course. In my high school years, we all had to read some of his most famous, bone-chilling tales. You might ask here, was making Poe a murder suspect just payback for a boring twelfth grade English class? No, I can assure you that is not it. In fact it was my fifteen years living in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the University of Virginia is located.

You see, the University is steeped in history, having been founded by Thomas Jefferson. And it is not at all shy about its connections with Poe, who was a student there for almost a year in 1826. In my work as a reference book author and editor in the 1990s, I frequented Alderman Library, the University's main library. It's a wonderful resource and also houses a prestigious special collection of Poe's papers. What's more, back then, you only had to glance across the street from the library's front steps to see the room Poe is said to have occupied while a student there. The room, #13 in the West Range, is something of a tourist attraction furnished as it would have been in Poe's time.
The University's historic Grounds and the connections with Poe naturally brought him to mind some years later when I began planning the Clay Cantrell Mystery Series. And as a fan of the long running PBS mystery series Inspector Morse, set in and around the historic Oxford University campus, I thought the University of Virginia would make an excellent backdrop for a murder mystery set here in the U.S.
 
But it was a bit of local lore from my days in Charlottesville that my imagination morphed into a key element for the story. Even today I remember being fascinated by a news story in the local paper about students sneaking into the complex of old steam tunnels running hither and yon under the University Grounds. I don't know how old the tunnels are, but I naturally imagined that some might date to the earliest days of the University. I never got the chance to explore those old tunnels myself, but that didn't stop me from putting them to good use in my evolving mystery novel. They offered the perfect place to wall up Annabel's body and keep it hidden for almost two centuries until my series hero, Clay, could find it by accident!

The rest of conjuring up my cold case mystery is, as they say, history.
 
 
Author Bruce Wetterau has written three novels for his Clay Cantrell Mystery Series, Lost Treasure, Killer Fog--The Veil of Mist Shrouds a Deadly Conspiracy, and most recently, The Girl Behind the Wall.

Before turning to novel writing, Wetterau spent over twenty years as a freelance reference book author and editor. He published eleven reference books under his own name and contributed to many others. Among his reference books are World History, A Dictionary of Important People, Places, And Events; The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies; and The Presidential Medal of Freedom--Winners and Their Achievements.
     
 
Fact and Fiction
Author Bruce Wetterau Talks About Writing the Mystery
 
While I wrote The Girl Behind the Wall so that prior knowledge of Poe's life and works is unnecessary, my plan from the start was to intertwine actual events from the last months of Poe's life with an entirely fictional mystery. I think at least some readers would like to know which events actually happened and which I conjured up to serve my mystery. It's not possible to account for every single true-to-life detail in the book (there are many) but I'll cover the key events below and in the timeline following this endnote.

The year 1849 saw more than the usual amount of "quiet desperation" in Poe's life. He was in fact dealing with the accumulated effects of alcoholism, failing health, poverty, and painful memories of his recently deceased child-bride wife, Virginia. At this time Poe also began suffering severe anxiety attacks coupled with strange hallucinations, what he called his "brain fever."

The central mystery I superimposed on Poe's life in The Girl Behind the Wall --those repressed memories of killing Annabelle Lee-- is of course entirely fictional but it springs from the distress Poe actually was suffering during the last months of his life. It also helped my cause that Poe is still something of an enigma, despite--or perhaps because of--what he wrote and all that has been written about him. Poe the man offered plenty for a mystery writer to work with, to spin a story about a troubled genius.

Nevertheless it's certainly fair to say I blurred the lines between fiction and actual fact in telling Poe's story. But like all good fiction there are elements of truth in the telling. What is an intriguing premise for a detective thriller also happens to have given light, I think, to the critical last months in the life of a truly imaginative writer.

The Girl Behind the Wall does remain true to the key events of Poe's life--so far as they are known. Poe's biographers helped make that possible by documenting so much of his life and times. But the wealth of information was a double-edged sword. Concocting a completely fictional story line that slips neatly within the confines of actual events--like your hand into a glove--well, I can tell you that proved very challenging, and satisfying to the nth degree.

In doing that I moved Poe about to places and through key events which mirror his real life, right up to the actual mystery of his death in Baltimore. They are the truth of it, the 'glove' into which I've slipped my mystery. Making Poe work as a character, though, meant writing what I thought he might have actually felt and said in both the real life and fictional situations.

The real life mystery of Poe's death in Baltimore has been the subject of considerable speculation because he actually did disappear for a week after boarding a steamer to Baltimore in late September, 1849. Then on October 3 he was found "strangely dressed [in ragged clothes] and semiconscious" outside a Baltimore tavern called Gunner's Hall. Taken to a hospital, Poe remained delirious for four days before dying on October 7.
 
What happened to Poe in Baltimore? An explanation considered likely is that he was "cooped" sometime after arriving there. It is known that back then thugs in the pay of corrupt Baltimore politicians routinely rounded up men, fed them drink, and kept them "cooped" for days before an election. Then, on election day, they used their charges as repeat voters. It so happens that the day Poe was found delirious outside Gunner's Hall was a congressional election day. And the tavern was in fact a polling place.

But Poe had sworn off drink the month before because of a near fatal episode of delirium tremens. Had he been taken prisoner by thugs and forced to drink? Or had he already fallen off the wagon by the time they found him? Why would he dare take a drink in either case, after his doctor told him another attack of the delirium tremens would be fatal? (And it was.) That's a mystery for which I've given my own answer, one that I believe is as much truth as it is fiction.

For those readers who would like to know just what parts of my story really are true to life, the timeline below summarizes the key events from Poe's last months.
 
       Timeline of Key Events in Poe's Life in 1849
 
1848-1849:  Poe is living and working in a modest cottage in Fordham, outside New York City. He is sharing the cottage with his beloved "Muddy," his mother-in-law, on whom he is strangely dependent for emotional support. The forty-year-old Poe at this time is famous, but the magazines and newspapers publishing his poems, stories, and literary reviews have paid him barely enough money to live on, at times even reducing him to begging for loans from friends and associates.
1848 (late). Seeking financial security, Poe wages a desperate campaign to romance and wed a wealthy woman in Providence, Rhode Island. His proposal ends in failure after the woman's mother, convinced that he is merely after her daughter's money, forces him to sign an humiliating prenuptial agreement. The final straw, though, comes about when Poe breaks his promise to his true love to abstain from drink. Twice.
April 1849. Poe's luck turns. He receives an offer to finance his dream of publishing a literary magazine called Stylus. His benefactor is a young newspaper publisher in the Midwest with the unlikely name of Edward Horton Norton Patterson. Patterson imposes an important stipulation: Before the magazine will go to press, Poe must enlist one thousand subscribers.
May 1849. Poe pens his now famous poem, Annabel Lee, about two young lovers and the tragic death of the heroine, Annabel Lee. This hauntingly beautiful ode returns to a theme Poe has focused on before--love cut short by the tragic loss of the fair damsel.
Poe apparently never publicly revealed who had inspired the poem's beautiful heroine. It certainly could have been his now dead child bride, Virginia Clemm. Or could it be, as Wetterau's mystery novel suggests, Poe's memorial to a young girl named Annabel Lee, who had died by his hand many years before?
 June 29,1849.  To drum up the thousand Stylus subscriptions, Poe leaves on what turns out to be a disastrous trip to Richmond and beyond, by way of Philadelphia. Poe by this time is prone to the anxiety attacks and does not travel well because of it. Case in point: On the train to Philadelphia, he becomes convinced he has overheard thugs planning to kill him. To escape, Poe unexpectedly gets off the train at Bordentown, NJ. He continues on to Philadelphia by a later train.
June 30. Poe arrives in Philadelphia, a city where he once lived and worked. Though it isn't known just what happened, he could have taken to drinking heavily to medicate his anxiety attack, or because he fell in with old friends there. That he began suffering wild hallucinations (the result of what is apparently his first-ever attack delirium tremens) is known, as is the fact he was arrested and spent the night in a Philadelphia jail for being drunk.
July 2. With a "wild and frightened expression in his eyes," Poe appears on the Philadelphia doorstep of friend and engraver John Sartain. Seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he begs Sartain's protection from the imagined thugs he supposedly overheard on the train. Sartain helps Poe shave off his mustache to confuse his supposed pursuers. Recovered the following day, Poe borrows money to continue on to Richmond but remains in Philadelphia for almost two more weeks. What he did during that time remains a mystery.
July 12. In desperate straits--starving, broke, missing one shoe, and deeply despondent--Poe arrives at the Quaker City newspaper office and begs enough money from his friend George Lippard to get to Richmond. Lippard later describes Poe's appalling condition.
July 14. Poe at last arrives in Richmond. In an emotional letter to Muddy written about that time, he spoke of his hallucinations in Philadelphia. He claims it was an attack of "brain congestion," brought on  by a "draught of calomel," a mercury-laced medicine of the day taken to prevent cholera. There was in fact an epidemic of cholera in Philadelphia and elsewhere at the time.
July 14- Sept. The weeks Poe spent in Richmond see him recovered and busy on two fronts: he begins giving the planned lectures to promote his magazine and he launches a new campaign to wed.
Poe again professes his undying love, this time to a Richmond woman, Elmira Shelton, who had been his childhood sweetheart. She is now--you guessed it--a wealthy widow. She at first refuses him, but wavers before his unrelenting professions of true love. It is eventually rumored there will be a wedding, but years later she claims they had a only a "partial understanding." Had she married Poe, she would have lost much of her inheritance, due to a restriction included in her dead husband's will.
August, dates uncertain. Poe again suffers serious reactions to drinking alcohol on two occasions. The first leaves him physically debilitated for some days. The second time he suffers a severe attack of delirium tremens and is near death for several days. His doctors warn that another attack will surely kill him.
August 27. Recovered, Poe joins the Sons of Temperance in Richmond and publicly pledges himself against alcohol.
September. Poe's dogged pursuit of Elmira apparently wrenches a conditional "yes" from her. On the strength of that, Poe decides to move Muddy and their worldly possessions from New York to Richmond. But that means traveling alone to New York for a man who, to say the least, does not travel well.
September 26. About to depart for New York, Poe again presses Elmira about the marriage, but apparently does not gain any new ground. She later says he was very distressed, feverish, and that he complained of being sick. After saying goodbye to Elmira, Poe does stop at a local doctor's office.
September 27, 4a.m.  Poe is known to have boarded a steamer bound for Baltimore, the first leg of his trip to New York. But nothing more is known about Poe's whereabouts for a week. Then on October 3 he is found "strangely dressed [in ragged clothes] and semiconscious" outside a Baltimore tavern called Gunner's Hall. Taken to a hospital, Poe remains in a feverish stupor for four days and at one point deliriously calls out a name, "Reynolds", for hours on end.
October 7.  Poe dies soon after falling silent in the early morning hours. The most likely cause of death is delirium tremens, though Poe's exposure to rainy and unseasonably cold weather out on Baltimore's streets may have contributed. Poe was just 40 years old.