Edgar Allan Poe The Works Vol 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE by Giancarlo Rossini

THE BLACK CAT

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR

THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO

THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

THE PURLOINED LETTER

THE THOUSAND, AND, SECOND TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE

Notes THE THOUSAND, AND, SECOND TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE

A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM

Notes A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTRÖM

VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY

MESMERIC REVELATION

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

THE TELL-TALE HEARTH

BERENICE

Notes BERENICE

ELEONORA

WILLIAM WILSON

THE DOMAIN OF ARNHEIM

Notes DOMAIN OF ARNHEIM

LANDOR'S COTTAGE

THE PREMATURE BURIAL

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

THE ASSIGNATION

SILENCE, A FABLE

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.

THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE

THE ISLAND OF THE FAY

Notes ISLAND OF THE FAY

PREFACE by Giancarlo Rossini

Edgar Allan Poe is the father of many genres, including, without a doubt, the detective novel. Edgar Allan Poe was the undisputed Father of the Detective Story. He created so much that is of importance in the field, literally creating the template for all of detective fiction to follow. (Years later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was to say that Poe was a model for all time.) Three stories are considered to be cornerstones of the genre: The Murderers of the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined letter. Cavalier Dupin is the first investigator in history, the model that, by similarity or reversal, unites all the numerous protagonists of the Detective Story starting with Sherlock Holmes.

For this reason, in this preface we would consider these three stories which we believe to be the most significant.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

In the preamble of The Murders of the Rue Morgue, the narrator of the story describes his theories on the intellect and analytical faculties. He discusses the difference between analysis and calculation, taking as an example the difference between a skilled chess player and a brilliant checkers player. The story is narrated in the first person. The protagonist, who tells us the story and whose name we do not know, opens the story by describing his meeting with Auguste Dupin, a cultured and witty man, fallen from grace and who lives with little, surrounded by the emanation of his only passion, the books. The context is Paris, where the narrator is on vacation. And the meeting with Dupin takes place in Montmatre, in a bookshop. After getting to know each other, they both decide to rent an apartment and live in it together, at least for the narrator's stay. Their friendship is strengthened over time through joint readings, discussions and nocturnal strolls through Paris.

One day they read a crime news article describing the heinous murder of two women, mother and daughter, which took place the day before in their home. The crime immediately attracts the attention of the two characters and many readers of the newspaper for the brutality and the mystery that surrounds it. In fact, the two women were killed in a room closed from the inside. The bodies were found in horrible condition. The strangled daughter was pushed upside down the chimney of the room, the mother, however, horribly mutilated, was almost beheaded. The police are groping in the dark and do not find sufficient clues to be able to draw a logical profile of the murderer or murderers. The witnesses who rushed into the apartment, while the two women screamed, heard two voices, one from a Frenchman and the other from a foreigner, which some identified as Russian, others as English, and still others as Spanish. Dupin is totally fascinated by this mystery and decides, thanks to his acquaintances in the police, to obtain a permit to visit the house. After a careful search around the building, the two enter the house and inspect the room, which was partially destroyed due to the terrible fight that two days earlier resulted in the death of the two women. Dupin, after observing the escape routes, is convinced that the killer escaped from a back door which, however, is closed, like the others, from the inside. Furthermore, the underlying wall is smooth and very high and has no grip that facilitates the descent. Dupin, however, observes that in front of him there is a lightning rod and that with a leap made by a very strong and agile person, one could reach the lightning rod from the window. But how did those who came out of there close the window from the inside? In reality, what looks like an intact nail and holds the window closed is broken inside, the frame with a spring mechanism allows the window to lower by itself. It is clear, however, that the leap from the window to the lightning rod could not have been done by a human being, no matter how well trained and very strong. Dupin is convinced, in fact, that he is not a man who committed the murder.

The Mystery of Marie Roget

Marie Roget is a girl, well known for her beauty, who one day vanishes, only to reappear some time later. She justifies this behavior by saying that she went to visit some relatives, but when traces of her are lost again, many perceive something anomalous and in fact one morning the young woman's body is found along the river bank. Despite the mystery surrounding the murder, the solution seems to be quite easy from the beginning, however several weeks pass until the police, having not come to terms with anything, are forced to put a price on the murderer, asking for the cooperation of anyone who can. provide important information in this regard. Auguste Dupin, reading the news that appeared in the Paris newspapers, begins a reconstruction of the facts, repeatedly misrepresented by the same press, and comes to discard all the hypotheses up to that point formulated by the investigators, unmasking the falsity of some evidence collected and the scarce reliability of various testimonies, and thus finding a trace, hitherto underestimated, which will lead to the discovery of the murderer.

The Purloined Letter

Taking into account the reading suggested by Peter Thoms in the essay contained in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter presents itself as a rather singular thriller, in which, at first glance, the hidden story that the detective must reveal to us is missing: not there is a murder, we know the nature of the stolen document and even who and how he committed the crime.

The culminating point of the story then becomes the delivery of the letter to a stunned Monsieur G. and the subsequent explanation of how Dupin recovered it. From this moment on, we realize how Dupin always maintains control of the situation as a reader and writer of the story of which he is the protagonist.

On an autumn evening, the narrator and Cavalier Dupin are meditating in their small library, when they receive an unexpected visit from the prefect of Paris, Monsieur G, who submits to Dupin the case of the stolen letter, a compromising document stolen by the Minister. D. from the royal apartments with a clever expedient and under the eyes of the helpless recipient. Despite the meticulous and repeated searches conducted at the minister's home, the police are unable to recover the precious letter. Dupin advised Monsieur G. to search the apartment again and asked for a detailed description of the letter. A month later the prefect returns to Dupin with nothing and the investigator asks him to write a check with the amount of the expected reward: the stolen letter is returned to a very amazed Monsieur G. In conclusion, Dupin explains to the equally astonished friend how he came to find the letter and how he stole it from the thief using a similar strategy. Dupin goes to the crime scene (in this case the apartment of Minister D.) and examines it minutely in an act reminiscent of reading, using a pair of green-lensed glasses to disguise his real intentions. Having identified the document placed in plain sight on the Minister's desk, he organizes a second visit and, taking advantage of the distraction of the thief attracted by the confusion caused on the street by an accomplice paid by Dupin, he takes possession of the letter by replacing it with a forged document by himself, using in practice the same technique adopted in the first theft. Dupin arrives at the solution of the mystery by reading the behavior of the Minister, identifying himself with his way of thinking and demonstrates that without this passage no research can be fruitful. The failure of Prefect G. is announced, as he does not absolutely take into account the mental abilities of the suspect, but is simply based on the investigation techniques normally used, which, however, can only bear fruit in common situations.

We think that in none of the three stories as in this one the manipulative abilities of Dupin are evident (the name of which refers to the English verb to dupe which means to deceive, to mock), starting from the spurious use of green glasses, up to the creation of the diversion in the street and the forgery of the letter in his own hand, as is the obvious contradiction between Dupin's social exclusion (asserted in the Murderers of the Rue Morgue) and the aim of destroying the political career of the perfidious minister who constitutes, together to the conspicuous reward, the motive for the investigator's action.

At the end of this last story, we can affirm that the road for the development of the detective story has now been traced: the elements that Poe uses to construct his narratives undoubtedly constitute the source to which, either by similarity or by reversal, all future authors will find themselves drawing.

THE BLACK CAT

For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad incede would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not, and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified, have tortured, have destroyed me.

Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but horror, to many they will seem less terrible than baroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace, some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than a ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.

From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.

This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point, and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.

Pluto, this was the cat’s name, was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.

Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance, had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but illused them. For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when, by accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me, for what disease is like Alcohol! and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish, even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.

One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

When reason returned with the morning, when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch, I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.

In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart, one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself, to offer violence to its own nature, to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only, that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin, a deadly sin that world so jeopardise my immortal soul as to place it, if such a thing were possibile, even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. On the night of the day on which this most cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facto, and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire, a fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with very minute and eager attention. The words strange! singular! and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas-relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal’s neck.

When I first beheld this apparition, for I could scarcely regard it as less, my wonder and my terror were extreme.

But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crown, by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.

Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to supply its place. One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of gin, or of rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat, a very large one, fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.

Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it, knew nothing of it, had never seen it before.

I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great favorite with my wife.

For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but, I know not how or why it was, its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed me. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually, very gradually, I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.

What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures. With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly, let me confess it at once, by absolute dread of the beast. This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil, and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own, yes, even in this felon’s cell, I am almost ashamed to own. that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by one of the merest chimeras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees, degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my reason struggled to reject as fanciful, it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name, and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared, it was now, I say, the image of a hideous, of a ghastly thing, of the GALLOWS! oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime, of Agony and of Death! And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast, whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed, a brute beast to work out for me, for me, a man fashioned in the image of the High God, so much of insufferable woe! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone, and in the latter I started hourly from dreams of unutterable fear to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight. an incarnate nightmare that I had no power to shake off, incumbent eternally upon my heart! Beneath the pressure of torments such as these the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates, the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas, was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.

One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal, which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded by the interference into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot without a groan. This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in the well in the yard, about packing it in a box, as if merchandise, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these. I determined to wall it up in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims. For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening. Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection, caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up and made to resemble the rest of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect any thing suspicious.

And in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crowbar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while with little trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brickwork.

When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself: Here at least, then, my labor has not been in vain. My next step was to look for the beast which had bene the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet with it at the moment, there could have been no doubt of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forbore to present itself in my present mood. It is impossible to describe or to imagine the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night; and thus for one night, at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul.

The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a free man.

The monster, in terror, had fled the premises for ever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some few inquiries had been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search had been instituted, but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my future felicity as secured.

Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever. The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.

Gentlemen, I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this, this is a very well-constructed house, (in the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all), "I may say an excellently well-constructed house.

These walls, are you going, gentlemen? these walls are solidly put together"; and here, through the mere frenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of