The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Edgar Allan Poe

The Murders in the Rue Morgue is, without question, the single most important story in the history of mystery fiction. In these few pages, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 1849) invented most of the significant elements in a literary form that relied on this template for the next one hundred seventy years: the brilliant detective, his somewhat dimmer sidekick, the still dimmer official police, the apparently impossible crime, misleading clues, the observation of disparate bits of information and the inspired deduction that results, and the denouement in which all is made clear.

Born in Boston and orphaned at the age of two when both of his parents died of tuberculosis, Poe was taken in by a wealthy merchant, John Allan, and his wife; although never legally adopted, Poe nonetheless took Allan for his name. He received a classical education in Scotland and England from 1815 to 1820. After returning to the United States, he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). It, and his next two volumes of poetry, were financial disasters. He won a prize for his story MS. Found in a Bottle (1833) and began a series of jobs as editor and critic of several periodicals. While he dramatically increased their circulations, his alcoholism, strong views, and arrogance enraged his bosses, costing him one job after another. He married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, living in abject poverty for many years with her and her mother. Lack of money undoubtedly contributed to the death of his wife at twenty-four. The most brilliant literary critic of his time, the master of horror stories, the poet whose work remains familiar and beloved to the present day, and the inventor of the detective story, Poe died a pauper.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was first published in the April 1841 issue of Graham s Magazine. It was first published in book form (if a forty-eight-page pamphlet may be counted as a book) in a very rare

THE BLACK LIZARD BOOK OF LOCKED-ROOM MYSTERIES

Table of Contents


Familiar as the rose in spring
The most popular and frequently reprinted impossible crime stories of all time

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
Jacques Futrelle, "The Problem of Cell 13"
Wilkie Collins, "A Terribly Strange Bed"
Lord Dunsany, "The Two Bottle of Relish"
G.K. Chesterton, "The Invisible Man"
Melville Davisson Post, "The Doomdorf Mystery"
Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Speckled Band"


This was the most unkindest cut of all
Stabbing in a completely sealed environment appears to be the most common murder method

John Dickson Carr, "The Wrong Problem"
William Hope Hodgson, "The Thing Invisible"
James Yaffe, "Department of Impossible Crimes"
R. Austin Freeman, "The Aluminum Dagger"
Gerald Kersh, "The Crewel Needle"
Stephen King, "The Doctor s Case"
Manly Wade Wellman, "A Knife Between Brothers"
Joseph Commings, "The Glass Gravestone"
Edgar Jepson & Robert Eustace, "The Tea Leaf"
Peter Godfrey, "The Flung-Back Lid"
John Lutz, "The Crooked Picture"
Carter Dickson, "Blind Man s Hood"


Footprints in the sands of time
Is there a more baffling scenario than to find a body in smooth sand (or snow) with no footprints leading to or from the victim?

Edward D. Hoch, "The Man from Nowhere"
Fredric Brown, "The Laughing Butcher"
Michael Innes, "The Sands of Thyme"
Samuel Hopkins Adams, "The Flying Death"
A.E. Martin, "The Flying Corpse"
Vincent Cornier, "The Flying Hat"


And we missed it, lost forever
It is a fantasy for many people to disappear from their present lives. Some people disappear because they want to, others disappear because someone else wants them to. And objects large objects sometimes disappear in the same manner.
 
Hugh Pentecost, "The Day the Children Vanished"
Stanley Ellin, "The Twelfth Statue"
William Irish, "All at Once, No Alice"
Edmund

Otto Penzler is a two-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the editor of numerous anthologies, among them eight other Vintage Crime/Black Lizard anthologies, most recently The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. He is the owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City.

The best gift ever for the fan of mysteries impossible to solve. . . . Penzler, an acclaimed mystery writer, has a gift for bringing back talented writers from historical obscurity.
     The Seattle Times

"This collection delivers more than 900 pages of wonderful reading. . . . Every fan of old-time detection will want this book."
     --The Washington Post

Unparalleled. . . . This is the ideal bedside book for mystery fans: packed with short, challenging tales of murder and deduction, easily consumed before the eyes flicker. . . . Many of the stories are classics (and worth reading again), but there are a number of writers here whose stories aren't well known, so there's much to discover.
     Shelf Awareness

"A wide-ranging collection of the impossible. . . . This intelligently assembled anthology of 68 short stories will be catnip for fair play fans. . . . The real treat is in the revelations of the gifts at misdirection from undeservedly obscure authors such as Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel s son), J.E. Gurdon, Augustus Muir, and Vincent Cornier, whose ingenious work is less likely to be encountered in other anthologies."
     --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Connoisseurs of this eccentric, demanding form will find this an indispensable resource, a pearl beyond price."
     --Kirkus Reviews