The famous American poet John Shade was murdered in 1959. This book contains his last poem, together with a preface, lengthy notes and an index by his posthumous editor. Yet this all too efficent editor is not as other editors are. Haughty, inquisitive, eccentric, intolerant he certainly is, but is he—can he possibly be—mad, bad, even dangerous?

Tall, brown-bearded, the narrator stalks through the book scattering clues with an imperious hand and discreetly skirting references to his more startling vices. A comic figure on a grand scale, he succeeds in telling us more perhaps than even he intended about what he calls 'the glorious friendship that brightened the last months of John Shade's life'.