A lifetime ago, I purchased a small paperback titled Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe. For those of you able to recall memories from the dim mists of time, you’ll remember that a variety of books such as Ten Great Mysteries could be purchased through your school. This lovely little volume, with its swirling green-and-yellow psychedelic cover and decidedly sinister, creepy-looking Poe, is the Scholastic Library Edition that still haunts my desk to this day, despite its brittle, yellowed pages. I won’t mention the copyright date for fear of ridicule.

But what brings me to this topic is the “mystery” these stories define. I never thought about this as a kid. I wanted to read Poe because he was spooky, a writer of the macabre, the paragon of suspense and terror. I was far more interested in the horror delivered by certain stories—”The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,”—rather than the groundbreaking mystery tales of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” Nearly everyone defines the last two as the foundation of modern detective fiction. There were contemporary writers in Poe’s time, and even some before, who dabbled in investigation and puzzle solving, but Poe appears to claim the title of father of the genre. However, Poe is no stranger to other genres (or mysteries): psychological suspense, horror, and crime. The constant scholar can make a case for all these in the tales.

Certainly, the 1960 film, The Fall of the House of Usher, starring a blond Vincent Price in the delicious role of Roderick Usher, piqued public interest in the writer, as did later movie adaptations of Poe’s stories. Perhaps Usher spawned the publication of Ten Great Mysteries.

The movies were fodder for a young man who purchased Famous Monsters of Filmland and other horror and science fiction magazines. Who must have come to Poe through such reading and late Saturday night TV creature features.

To me, Poe’s horror came in “the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder,” “any death but that of the pit,” or the maddening and turbulent descent into the maelstrom. In Poe’s world, at least from an editorial viewpoint, the definition of mystery included suspense, horror, madness, and incest. And, yes, crime is rampant in the stories too.

And the language! The sentence structure, the tone, the generated suspense. Who could ever forget a word like “putrefaction” when first confronted with its foul and slimy presence? Poe did so much to change American literature and, for that, we owe him our gratitude.

When I purchased this modest volume, probably for the astounding sum of ten cents, I started to read through the stories, and much to my chagrin, I found many words I didn’t understand. Much the same thing happened a few years later when I bought a copy of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, only to be turned off by the Yorkshire dialect. I had been fooled into thinking that Emily’s masterpiece was a ghost story, i.e., horror. Of course, it is in a way, but ghosts are not the focus of the novel. Rather, I would say, obsession. When I was 38 years old, I picked up the book again and was transfixed and transformed into a Brontë fanatic.

In closing, I would like to recount a story—again from the distant past. Struggling with the words and some of Poe’s concepts, I asked my mother to read me one of his stories. I selected “The Black Cat,” possibly because I’ve always been an animal lover and I had some inkling—I don’t remember how—of what the story was about.

It was summer, the day was brutally hot, and by ten o’clock we had our one window air conditioner running to chase away the Kansas heat. I will always remember my mother sitting in her new French Provincial chair, which she was so proud of, with my small volume of Poe in her hand. The brilliant light cut through the glassine curtains and fell in shafts on the floor. Her body was backlit against the picture window. And she read the story. I remember thanking her for taking the time because it was her day off.

Jumping about forty years forward, I came up with an idea for a novel called Poe’s Mother. It’s about a family that worships Poe in the way that others worship their chosen religion. Only available in e-book, it was never a commercial success—I self-published it—but the reviews made my day. Most readers wrote they’d never read a novel so disturbing and weird. I hope that Poe would appreciate my effort.

A life without Poe—a life without this definition of mystery—would be unthinkable.

About the Author

V.S. Alexander writes across genres, including mystery, historical fiction, psychological suspense, and horror. His eleven novels have garnered critical acclaim domestically and have been published in more than a dozen countries. The Voyage, a novel about the Titanic and a devoted dog aboard, is slated for publication this December. V. S. lives in Maine and is currently at work on a mystery series set in West Yorkshire, England.