Murder and mayhem abound in three suspenseful stories by Edgar Allan Poe, whose 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 Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, James, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alice Dunbar Nelson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rabindranath Tagore.

Autorentext

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.