Pop culture owes the word “detective” to this author: Edgar Allan Poe died 175 years ago. A mysterious horror, Poe’s great gift to world literature, also surrounds his last days.
When the American writer Edgar Allan Poe walked into Richmond on an ordinary fall day in 1849, the creator of so many grisly fantasies certainly did not foresee his own gruesome death. He was found a week later, 250 kilometers away in the city of Baltimore, drugged and bloated by alcohol or drugs, in deadly agony. The man, who had been so elegant all his life, was dressed in tattered clothes that were full of dirt – that didn’t belong to him.
Poe (1809-1849) died at five o’clock on the morning of October 7th, 175 years ago. What happened to him in the days of his disappearance is still not clear to this day. Was it highway robbery? Did Poe fall into the hands of unscrupulous and brutal vote-gatherers during a local election campaign, who repeatedly beat him to the polls? The dying man was no longer lucid enough to explain it.
Big bang of crime fiction
Poe’s death could well be the material for one of his own detective or horror stories – world literature owes both genres to the great American. Without his work, the figure of the detective would probably never have achieved this importance in pop culture. Above all, the short story “The Double Murder in the Rue Morgue,” written in 1841, is a kind of big bang of crime fiction.
Poe was the first to create a fictional story from the perspective of a detective. Thanks to him, the word “detective” itself moved from French first into English and then into international usage. His hero Auguste Dupin was the prototype of the analytical investigator, the forefather of Sherlock Holmes and others.
“Poe was a master of effects; he was obsessed with the figures and images of fear, catastrophe, and suction and increased them to the utmost,” writes literary scholar Wolfgang Martynkewicz in his well-read biography of Poe. “Like a magician, he played with the desire for ruin, which he not only staged aesthetically over and over again, but which was part of his life, his existence.”
Stories like nightmares
Poe created stories like nightmares, told from the first person perspective. In “The Treacherous Heart” the narrator describes his murder of an old man. The motive: He hates his anomaly, a membrane on one of the eyes. For a week he sneaks in with the old man night after night, silently observes the man – and yet cannot kill him because the sleeping man’s eyes are closed. Until one night the intruder accidentally makes a noise. He watched the victim in the darkness for an hour: “I knew what the old man felt and felt sorry for him, even though I was laughing in my heart.” Finally, the narrator shines a light in the man’s face, sees the eye, kills. And things get even scarier in the story.
In other stories there is no further explanation at all as to why a person murders sadistically: In “The Barrel of Amontillado” the narrator lures a friend into a vault and ultimately into a macabre death trap in order to take revenge for a thousand-fold insults. What could possibly have happened? We don’t find out. It is precisely this gap technique that makes good horror, as Poe’s horror poem “The Raven” radiates powerfully (“Language of the Raven: Nevermore”). His heirs HP Lovecraft and Stephen King were to develop this further.
Buried in just three minutes
It should only be mentioned in passing that Poe’s idea of a trip to the moon in “The Incomparable Adventure of a Certain Hans Pfaall” can be seen as a foretaste of the science fiction genre. The English writer Hans-Dieter Gelfert once described Poe as the most powerful American classic and most read US storyteller of the 19th century.
Even if his fame lasts forever: the genius only had a short life of 40 years. According to tradition, his funeral lasted just three minutes on a cold Monday afternoon. The mourning congregation – essentially Poe’s immediate family – was so small at eight people that the priest decided not to give a sermon. Sexton George W. Spence later recalled: “It was a dark and gloomy day, there was no rain, but it was just rough and threatening.”
Source: Stern
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.