Poe's three classic tales of mystery and detection
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection
The precursor to Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot: Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin is blessed with the gift of intuition, and he puts it to the test after a horrible murder in the Rue Morgue.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is thought to be the first modern detective story, published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841. In this classic tale the detective demonstrates the ineptitude of the police, the value of reason, and how it’s the seemingly least important details that often matter most. A landmark in the history of detective fiction. Selected from Vintage’s compact selection of Poe’s greatest work, Great Tales and Poems. An eBook short.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, USA, in 1809. Poe, short story writer, editor and critic, he is best known for his macabre tales and as the progenitor of the detective story. He died in 1849, in mysterious circumstances, at the age of forty.
J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English Emeritus at Louisiana State University and a past president of the Poe Studies Association. His books on Poe include Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (1987), “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and the Abyss of Interpretation (1995), and several edited volumes including A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (2001), Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001; with Liliane Weissberg), and Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (2012; with Jerome McGann). His major contribution to American literary studies is Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (2016), written with the support of fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also published Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (1993), and he edited the Penguin Classics edition of The Life of Black Hawk (2008). He has appeared in many Poe documentary films, including The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe(1994) for the A&E Biography series and Eric Stange’s film for the PBS American Masterpiece series, Edgar A. Poe: Buried Alive (2017).
