Stranger than Fiction

The symbol of all that is dark was actually a trickster. His famous tales of terror are tricks.  

The Longest Con gives you the whole incredible story. 

It takes you inside Poe’s astonishing stealth mysteries: the works that look like tales of terror, but conceal murders with logical solutions. 

And it follows the logic of that discovery: As we haveve been wrong about these tales, so we’ve been wrong about Poe.  

Take a fresh look and you find trickery everywhere. Amazing secrets in “The Purloined Letter” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Parodies so subtle that most readers (including many scholars) take them seriously. Even his supposedly “bitter” literary battles were charades. 

Read the true story that’s more fantastic than any of Poe’s tales. 

Annotated Table of Contents

1. Duped 
   Tales read by millions, and none of us saw the simple secret. 
2. A Case of Deception: “The Black Cat” 
   The narrator says that his story recounts “an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.” It does. 
3. Hidden Murder Mysteries 
   The genesis of Poe’s design. Why the mysteries went unrecognized and why this was probably not what Poe intended. 
4. The Art of the Con 
   How narrators deceive us without actually lying. 
5. The Secrets of “Ligeia” 
   All that mumbo-jumbo, hiding the oldest ghost story plot of all. 
6. The Mystery of the House of Usher 
   A house that has stood for centuries suddenly collapses one week after an unexplained death, and we don’t get suspicious? 
7. A Mockery of Our Horror: “The Tell-Tale Heart 
   Why were the policemen laughing? 
8. Straightforward Deception: “The Man of the Crowd” 
   A secret which the narrator says is too dark ever to be known stares us in our face. 
9. The Logic of the Lie 
   If the narrators’ accounts are false, and their terror is feigned, then these works are not really about terror at all. And then neither is Poe. 
10. Mystification 
    A portrait of Poe: the artist as a con man. 
11. A Taxonomy of Poe’s Jests 
    Scratch almost any tale, and you uncover a secret, a trick, or a practical joke. 
12. Secret Identities: “The Assignation” and “The Oblong Box” 
    Two of Poe’s less popular tales hide stories of murderous passion. 
13. Hybrid Mysteries: “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” 
    Two final stealth mysteries: one poses as a fantasy, the other resembles a Twilight Zone episode. 
14. “All Put On”: Poe’s Literary Battles 
    Poe was a trickster 24/7. Even his famous literary battles were put-ons. 
15. Partial Solutions 
    The signs of deception are clear; the hidden truth only partly so. Four tales waiting to be solved.