Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Other Tales

Complete and unabridged, with 41 full-page plates by Francisco Goya, Odilon Redon and John Martin. Poe at his most methodical: Dupin opening the locked room of the Rue Morgue and then solving a real New York murder from the newspapers in The Mystery of Marie Roget, the cipher and the buried treasure of The Gold-Bug, a balloon voyage to the moon, the transatlantic Balloon-Hoax that a New York paper printed as news, a manuscript thrown from a doomed ship, and the oval portrait that drains its sitter. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story in these pages and sold it to a Philadelphia magazine. The volume opens with an appreciation of Poe and a contemporary account of his death. The horror is in the procedure, not the shriek. Forty-one plates, from Fuseli's Weird Sisters to Odilon Redon, gather the uncanny and the criminal that Poe's reasoning only half explains.