The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part II: 1940–1943

Finding his stride, but still all over the map

This is the second of three posts reviewing the complete short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Part I covered his career from 1832 to 1839. Part II looks at his stories published from 1840 through 1843. In this second batch of stories, Poe definitely shows improvement from his writings of the 1830s. Most noticeably, he no longer feels the need to fill his stories with gratuitous references to classical literature, romantic poetry, and untranslated quotes in various languages—at least not in his horror and mystery stories, which seem aimed at an intelligent general public. His humorous stories, however, still come across as pretentious, as if he were trying hard to show off his erudition. His comedic efforts are also not very funny, at least not 150+ years after the fact, anyway.

In the early 1840s, Poe wrote several of his best-known stories, tales that most readers would consider “classic Poe.” In his pioneering mystery story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe introduces the detective C. Auguste Dupin, an influential precursor to Sherlock Holmes and many other literary sleuths. Dupin makes a second appearance in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” While “Rue Morgue” is a near-perfect classic, “Marie Rogêt” is merely good and suffers from a lack of conclusion. In the horror department, Poe made great strides with landmark offerings “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Upon rereading, the latter story feels a bit overrated—a Rube-Goldberg torture scenario that pulls its punches in the end—but the rest have held up well and deserve their acclaim as masterworks of the genre. “The Oval Portrait” and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” are not great, but at least they’re in the right ballpark. “The Gold-Bug,” another of Poe’s best, is more of an adventure story in the same vein as many of Jules Verne’s adventures.

Outside of those genres for which he’s known, Poe is less successful. Humor stories like “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” and “Three Sundays in a Week” are lackluster comedic offerings in which Poe spends the entire story pointing out the absurdity of an idiom. “The Island of the Fay” is an inconsequential brief involving faeries. “The Man in the Crowd” consists of descriptive street scenes that never really lead anywhere. “The Landscape Garden” is not really a story at all but rather an essay on what makes a good garden.

Overall, this bunch of stories is better than his earlier work, but still the overall effect of Poe’s oeuvre is less than impressive. In reading his complete works, I’ve learned that one would be better off avoiding his humorous stories, which only serve to lessen one’s assessment of Poe as a writer. It would serve one better to look for a collection with a title such as Tales of Mystery and Terror, which is likely to contain most of his stories worth reading. Still, I’m going to stick it out for the last third of his career and will report back when I’ve finished.

Stories in this collection

Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling

The Business Man

The Man of the Crowd

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

A Descent into the Maelström

The Island of the Fay

The Colloquy of Monos and Una

Never Bet the Devil Your Head

Eleonora

Three Sundays in a Week

The Oval Portrait

The Masque of the Red Death

The Landscape Garden

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Gold-Bug

The Black Cat

Diddling