I Read Books: Selected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
A cheap Penguin Popular Classic I got years ago. It has most of Poe’s classic stories (not his poetry). The Masque of the Red Death is a bit raw for the current moment but his other tales of grotesquerie stand up pretty well. The Cask of Amontillado is very good, the 19th century tendency to prolix working with the story in this case.
There are a few odd ones. It opens with The Duc De L’Omelette, in which the titular Duc dies (eating an ortolan), then plays cards with the devil. Apparently it’s a satire on Nathaniel Parker Willis, an author I am sadly not familiar with. It’s humorous or rather “humorous”, there’s some joke shaped passages that don’t work for me.
Another one that left me puzzled was the Domain of Arnheim which puts forward the suggestion that landscape gardening is the ultimate art, then tries to describe it with words. Was the irony lost on Poe or is that the point, I don’t know.
There’s an unsubtle, and so still occasionally funny piece, How To Write A BlackWood Article, which curiously does not have the companion piece that was theoretically written as a result of the events in that article.
Poe’s classic three proto-detective stories of M Dupin are included. The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a sensationalist mystery in which Dupin methodically takes apart the investigation of the police, then makes a wild and extraordinary jump to the conclusion. It is extremely Sherlock Holmes, right down to the bright but not brilliant chronicaller. The Purloined Letter is a mystery of a different type, showing some of the possible range of the detective story at its very beginning. The Mystery of Marie Rogêt meanwhile is an extraordinarily interesting failure of a story; Dupin reads reports of the murder of Marie Rogêt (a lightly fictionalised version of a real murder). He tears apart some of the newspaper reports, “...in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation – to make a point – than to further the course of truth.” Unfortunately there is no story, and no conclusion. This is a long fictional essay on how to begin at making a deductive detective, and the perils of believing in the reports of the popular press.
A fine and varied collection of Poe’s prose fiction.
Read This: An interesting introduction to Poe’s work
Don’t Read This: It gets a bit longwinded and occasionally gruesome; an annotated version might be helpful for those readers not instantly familiar with the French and Latin tags he sprinkles through the work
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