The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part III: 1844–1849

Treasures are few in this batch

This year I set out to read the compete short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. To make this task manageable, I have broken these 65 tales into three sizable portions. The first and second installments in this series followed Poe’s published output chronologically. This, the third of such reviews, covers the last five or six years of Poe’s career.

In this third batch of short fiction, you won’t find much of what is considered classic Poe. “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story every American reads in school, is the headliner here. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” about a mesmerist who hypnotizes a dying man to see if the trance will survive the transition to the afterlife, is another skillful tale of horror and suspense. “The Purloined Letter,” is the third and final mystery starring Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin. It’s a familiar title in Poe collections, but a bit overrated. It’s the least ingenious and satisfying of Dupin’s trio of adventures.

A few other tales of horror, suspense, or science fiction include “The Premature Burial,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Sphinx,” and “Von Kempelen and His Experiment”—all capable efforts, but none of them earth-shattering. As with the previous two batches of Poe tales, a good portion of these 24 works are humorous stories, or at least intended to be. Such titles as “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “X-ing a Paragrab” give some indication of what you’re in for. In most cases, Poe’s comedy has not held up well over the intervening century and a three-quarters. “Some Words with a Mummy,” however, really is quite a funny piece of social satire.

Another interest of Poe’s was gardening. “The Domain of Arnheim” is an expanded retread of his 1842 story “The Landscape Garden.” Neither of these are really stories but rather essays in which Poe pontificates on what makes a good landscape garden. Poe’s final published story, “Landor’s Cottage,” is also devoted to this subject. Poe describes his perfect landscape, perfect house, perfect furnishings, even his perfect woman. None of these three “tales” have any plot, they’re all quite boring, and when it comes to nature, Poe is no Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman. His natural descriptions read as surprisingly geometric rather than poetic.

Overall, reading Poe’s complete stories has proved rather disappointing. If you buy any collection of Poe’s tales of mystery, horror, and/or suspense, you’re probably going to get twelve to fifteen stories that are the cream of the crop. Most of Poe’s comedic attempts won’t be included in such collections, as they have deservedly faded into obscurity. On the whole, I would say Poe missed more than he hit, at least for a 21st-century audience, but the same could probably be said for his contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. At least Poe did leave us with some masterpieces­—like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—that are among America’s best works of short fiction.

Stories in this collection

The Spectacles

A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

The Premature Burial

Mesmeric Revelation

The Oblong Box

The Angel of the Odd

Thou Art the Man

The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.

The Purloined Letter

The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade

Some Words with a Mummy

The Power of Words

The Imp of the Perverse

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

The Sphinx

The Cask of Amontillado

The Domain of Arnheim

Mellonta Tauta

Hop-Frog

Von Kempelen and His Experiment

X-ing a Paragrab

Landor’s Cottage

The Lighthouse (a fragment left unfinished)

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part II: 1840–1843

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

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt by Edgar Allan Poe

A long story but only half a mystery

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s better-known mystery “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Both stories feature the Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin. Both “Rue Morgue” and “Marie Rogêet” are generally classified as short stories, but the latter—the longest of Poe’s “short” stories—is probably lengthy enough to be called a novella. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was originally serialized in three issues of the magazine Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion in late 1842 and early 1843.

Marie Rogêt is a beautiful young working woman—what the French would call a grisette—who is well-known and well-liked in her neighborhood. One morning she leaves her home, stating that she’s going to visit her aunt nearby. She never arrives at her aunt’s house, however, and instead goes missing. A few days later her body is found floating in the Seine, showing signs of struggle indicating that she was murdered. Poe based this on the real-life murder of a Mary Rogers that happened in New York. There’s nothing wrong with how Poe uses the facts of the Rogers case as the basis for his fiction. He writes, however, as if he expects the reader to know all about Mary Rogers and the details of her case, in the same way that a writer of today might expect everyone in America to know about the Nicole Brown Simpson murder.

This story really makes it obvious that Dupin was an influential precursor to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Much like Holmes, Dupin is a master of deduction. His cases are narrated by his best friend who is also his roommate, much like Dr. Watson. The two are hanging out in their apartment when they are consulted by a police detective, “G,” who asks for their help—shades of Inspector Lestrade. Then the detective and his friend consult the newspaper accounts of the crime, and they have half the case figured out before they ever even venture out of their sitting room. This is the plot framework of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and it became the template for the majority of Holmes and Watson stories.

The deductive reasoning that Poe writes for Dupin in this story is impressively ingenious. One wonders how he even thought up some of these details. The way Dupin analyzes the accounts of the case and infers details about the crime would be commendable for a mystery written today; for a mystery written way back at the dawn of the genre, it’s rather stunning. This is a fantastic detective story up until the ending, or rather the lack of an ending. Whereas Holmes and Watson eventually get off the couch and go after the killer, here the reader is robbed of that satisfaction. The resolution of the case happens “off-camera,” so to speak, and the read never really gets to know who the killer is. How utterly disappointing! While Poe may have been a pioneer of the detective fiction genre, he still had some kinks to work out in his narrative approach.

Conan Doyle, of course, added a great deal to the mystery genre. Holmes and Watson certainly have more vivid personalities than Dupin and his unnamed narrator, who could just as well be soulless computers. Based on “Rue Morgue” and “Marie Rogêt,” however, one wonders what a marvelous series of mysteries Poe could have written if he had made a career out of it like Conan Doyle did. Dupin makes a third and final appearance in “The Purloined Letter” (1844).   

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part 1: 1832–1839

Off to a slow start

Unlike other A-list names in the history of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe is not known for his novels. He only published one: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and it wasn’t a hit. Other than his poem “The Raven,” we know Poe primarily for his short stories. Counts vary, based on what’s considered a short story, but I’m going to go with Wikipedia and the Delphi Classics and say he published 65 stories, plus one unfinished at the time of his death. These stories, or “tales” as they are often called in Poe’s case, have been selected and shuffled like a deck of cards into thousands of published volumes. I’m going to review these 65 and a half stories in chronological order, in three chunks of about 20 stories each.

Poe’s first published story, “Metzengerstein,” happens to be a horror story, and a pretty good one, but very few of the tales published in these first seven or eight years of his career could be considered classic Poe horror stories. Another early entry, the nautical ghost story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” is also a step in the right direction. “Ligeia,” from 1838, seems like a turning point in Poe’s career. This is the first story to really epitomize the mix of gothic romance and terrifying horror that we usually think of when we think of Poe. “William Wilson,” a horror story about a man tormented by his doppelganger, is another strong entry from this period. The only selection from this chunk of stories that can truly be considered a Poe masterpiece, however, is “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe is also remembered for mystery stories and, to a lesser extent, science fiction. None of the former category are here, but sci-fi is represented by the postapocalyptic “The Conversation Between Eiros and Charmion,” and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” which shows us Poe operating in Jules Verne mode, with only partial success.

In this first act of Poe’s career, he wrote just as many humor stories as horror stories. In most cases, the humor has not survived the past nine decades very well. A couple of these comedic efforts remain moderately funny, however, like “Devil in the Belfry” and “A Predicament.” In “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Poe satirizes the typical fare from the English literary periodical Blackwood’s Magazine. Many of the literary pretensions Poe pokes fun at in this piece, however, are sins he is frequently guilty of committing himself. In these early writings, his biggest fault as a writer is his uncontrollable desire to show of his erudition by loading his prose with gratuitous references to classical poetry, mythology, opera, or other high-brow literature. He also loves to throw in untranslated phrases in French, Latin, Greek, and maybe even German. There’s no need for any of this, and it’s just Poe showing off how well-read he is. In this regard, he’s more pretentious than Melville or Hawthorne. Thankfully, Poe seems to gradually cure himself of this annoying habit towards the end of the 1830s.

I had read “greatest hits” collections of Poe’s horror stories in the past and liked them well enough, but I have to admit that this first foray into his complete works was a disappointment. As previously mentioned, there’s just too much laughless humor and too much effort to impress with high-falutin allusions. His writing did improve over the course of these years, however, and I am confident that the second round of his stories that I dive into will be superior to the first.

Stories in this collection

Metzengerstein

The Duc de l’Omelette

A Tale of Jerusalem

Loss of Breath

Bon-Bon

MS. Found in a Bottle

The Assignation

Berenice

Morella

Lionizing

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

King Pest

Shadow

Four Beasts in One

Mystification

Silence

Ligeia

How to Write a Blackwood Article

A Predicament

The Devil in the Belfry

The Man That Was Used Up

The Fall of the House of Usher

William Wilson

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion