THE LAST MYSTERY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

More noxious fall-out in the wake of Seven Per Cent Solution, this time with ailing E. A. Poe enlisted by N.Y. Police Superintendent Hollis Beckwith to help catch The Garroter, who strangles upper-class Manhattan lasses and then mutilates and violates. First-novelist Meyers clumsily injects some Poe biography and a few historical lecture-notes (""Take a look, Poe, at New York in transition""), but his chief preoccupation is sexual: unnecessary detail on the sex crimes, unnecessary scenes of Beckwith's sex life, and a final confrontation in which Beckwith berates Poe: ""What could I expect from an effeminate scribbler, who can only have an orgasm with words?"" The thoroughly idiotic conclusion involves Queen Victoria. She--and we--are not amused.