Murder and mayhem abound in three suspenseful stories by Edgar Allan Poe, whose nineteenth-century writing left a lasting impact on the gothic and horror genres.

On board a ship, a man watches on as his old friend appears increasingly disturbed. What luggage could be so precious that Cornelius Wyatt would leave it in a locked cabin? 'The Oblong Box' is a masterclass in mystery writing. In 'The Cask of Amontillado', Italian carnival festivities are the perfect distraction for a man driven to bleak and bloody revenge. One of the earliest examples of the classic detective story is 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', a tale that is as violent as it is puzzling. Can Parisian detective Auguste Dupin figure out who killed Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter one July night?

This series of pocket-sized paperbacks celebrates the art of the short story and marks Macmillan Collector's Library's 10th anniversary. Each contains a curated selection of short stories from a literary giant: Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alice Dunbar Nelson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rabindranath Tagore.

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Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Orphaned at the age of three, he was raised by John Allan, a prosperous merchant. Poe published his first volume of poetry while still a teenager. He worked as an editor for magazines in Philadelphia, Richmond and New York, and was a respected literary critic. In 1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. It was only with the publication of his poem 'The Raven' in 1845 that Poe achieved national fame as a writer. He died suddenly and mysteriously in 1849, aged forty.