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Case: Johnathan Shade
File Entry: 548302
Date: March 6th, 1999
Detective: Richard Lamberty
This is an entry to the case file catalog concerning the alleged murder of poet Jonathan
Shade. At the time of my writing, the case is nearly a decade old. After perusing the vari-
ous files in this record, I’ve discovered that the case was taken out of the hands of the
public police domain shortly after it began, and was relocated to a Government-funded
detective team. From that point, our record shows that the case went cold. As it was my
now-deceased wife and partner, Meredith, who was responsible for the initial case prior to
its relocation, I was curious about its outcome. I reached out to the Government detective
team who took over our case, and discovered that the case was not solved, and was not
being actively pursued. I explained in my response that I had a vested interest in the case
due to my former wife’s involvement, and requested access to the case files. To my sur-
prise, the response I got was that there was only one file on record for the case: a notice of
admitted entry to Matherson’s Mental Institute. The rest, I was told, seemed to have
been deleted from the record entirely. The most curious part of all, however, was the name
listed for the check-in at Matherson’s. The only name supplied for the patient was ‘Pale
Fire’, which of course is not a patient’s name at all, but rather the name of the poet Jona-
than Shade’s final work.
After reading the poem, I was shocked to find that the Commentary, seemingly written
by the self-acclaimed literary scholar Charles Kinbote, described the murder in detail,
claiming that the murderer was a man named Gradus. Many of the details which might
have been key to the case, however, were left quite vague. The story’s characters and situ-
ations were all suspect, I found, after reading the book. Moreover, I found that some of
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