Auguste Dupin, himself the literary inspiration for Sherlock Holmes), the puzzle- or code-based thriller (would we have had The Da Vinci Code without Poe’s ‘ The Gold-Bug’, I wonder?), the ambiguous ghost story (see ‘ The Tell-Tale Heart’), and, of course, the horror story (‘ The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘ The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘ The Black Cat’, and so on). It was in his short stories that he helped to lay the groundwork for modern science fiction (see his ‘ The Balloon-Hoax’), detective fiction (his trilogy of tales featuring C.
But his short stories were where he not merely excelled but showed the form itself how it could excel. With only a modicum of distress I could resign myself to a world without Poe’s poetry, even the much-quoted ‘The Raven’, and he famously never left behind a novel.
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