Murder in the Shadows

Why Poe and Berlioz Make Perfect Partners

31 October 2025 ~ 3 min read

Here’s something most people don’t know: Edgar Allan Poe dreamed of going to Paris. He wanted to seek an appointment from the Marquis de Lafayette, and he came close enough to the idea that you can feel it tugging at his biography. But he never made the trip.

Hector Berlioz, meanwhile, was already there—enrolled in medical school to please his family while secretly stashing musical compositions in church organs and under floorboards all over the city. It was 1830. Poe was twenty-one, drowning in gambling debts and feuding with his foster father. Berlioz was twenty-four, hiding a revolutionary symphony in his coat pocket. Two young men, roughly the same age, at exactly the same crossroads: betray the family or betray the art.

The question that lit The Year of Shadows wasn’t “wouldn’t it be cool if they met?” It was: “What if Poe actually got on that ship?”

The more I dug into their biographies, the more the parallels piled up. Both were obsessed with death and beauty—Poe on the page, Berlioz in the orchestra pit. Both were reinventing their art forms from the ground up. Poe was developing what he’d later call “ratiocination”—the method of pure logical deduction that would essentially invent detective fiction. As Arthur Conan Doyle himself put it: “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” Berlioz, meanwhile, was composing the Symphonie Fantastique, a piece so radical it basically invented program music. Two revolutionaries, working in parallel, tearing down the walls of their respective crafts.

And then there’s the murder angle. Once I put these two in the same boarding house, the mystery element practically wrote itself. Think about it: Poe’s mind was already wired for deduction—pattern recognition, obsessive attention to detail, a morbid fascination with how people die. And Berlioz? He turned out to be the perfect partner—impulsive where Poe is methodical, driven by gut feeling where Poe follows logic, and absolutely fearless in a midnight chase by the Seine River. (You’ll have to read the book for that one.)

What surprised me most during the writing was how naturally the music and the crime-solving fed each other. Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique—which really did premiere on December 11, 1830—tells the story of an artist who poisons himself with opium, hallucinates his own execution, and ends up at a witches’ sabbath. It’s already a crime story set to music. All I had to do was give him a friend who could investigate real crimes while Hector turned those same dark obsessions into sound. The symphony became the novel’s secret backbone: every case Edgar solves feeds into the music Hector is writing, and every movement Hector composes reflects something they’ve lived through together.

There’s a moment late in the novel—I won’t spoil the details—where Hector transforms the idée fixe, the beautiful melody representing the woman he loves, into something twisted and grotesque. He does it because real life handed him exactly the kind of betrayal that turns love into art. And while Hector is chasing his impossible muse, Edgar finds one of his own—Eleanor Morel, a young woman fighting her way into the male-dominated world of Paris medicine. She’s brilliant, she’s fearless, and she has a knack for criminal investigation that makes her the missing piece of the trio. Edgar starts calling her “Lenore,” somehow intuiting her childhood nickname—and if that name sends a shiver down the spine of any Poe reader, well, that’s exactly the point. The heart of the book isn’t really the murders or the deductions. It’s the question of what it costs to make something beautiful out of something terrible—and who you become when you try.

Poe and Berlioz never actually met, as far as history records. But 1830 Paris was a small world for young artists, and I like to think the universe missed a trick. So I fixed it.

The Year of Shadows is a novel about that year. This isn’t exactly how it all went down—but it’s how it could have.

— Liam