Welcome to Secrets of Poe: You Don’t Know Poe 

You know Edgar Allan Poe. 

Or at least you think you do. 

You know the mournful poet, the haunted houses, the premature burials, the murderous narrators, and that bird who simply will not leave. 

But there’s another Poe hiding behind the one we’ve been given for nearly two centuries. 

A Poe who played jokes. 

A Poe who perpetrated hoaxes. 

A Poe who planted clues, constructed puzzles, fooled editors, deceived readers, and sometimes seemed to take particular pleasure in watching people believe things they probably shouldn’t. 

In other words, Edgar Allan Poe was playing with us. 

And we fell for it. 

We Have Been Had 

Consider the Poe story you probably know best. 

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a murderer calmly explains that he cannot possibly be mad. And what do generations of readers do? 

We listen to him. 

In “The Black Cat,” another murderer gives us an elaborate explanation of his crimes. Again, we dutifully follow along. 

Poe repeatedly hands the microphone to people who lie, exaggerate, misunderstand, rationalize, conceal, and occasionally appear to be making things up altogether. 

Then he leaves us to decide what actually happened. 

That’s the game. 

Poe doesn’t always solve his mysteries for us. Sometimes he doesn’t even announce that there is a mystery. 

He leaves evidence. 

The Detective Is You 

Poe famously created C. Auguste Dupin, the brilliant amateur investigator who became the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and virtually every eccentric fictional detective who followed. 

But I think Poe invented another detective as well. 

The reader. 

Again and again, Poe asks us to notice something that doesn’t quite add up. 

A suspicious detail. 

An impossible explanation. 

A narrator who protests a little too much. 

A clue sitting innocently in the middle of a sentence. 

A joke concealed beneath apparent seriousness. 

The challenge is recognizing that Poe has challenged us in the first place. 

That’s Why Secrets of Poe Exists 

I’ve spent much of my academic life reading, teaching, writing, and talking about Edgar Allan Poe. The longer I’ve studied him, the less interested I’ve become in the familiar portrait of Poe as simply the gloomy master of horror. 

There is a much more interesting man behind that mask. 

He could be mischievous, competitive, funny, calculating, exasperating, and extraordinarily clever. He understood what readers expected—and he knew how to use those expectations against them. 

That’s the Poe we’ll investigate here. 

We’ll look at mysteries hidden inside familiar stories. We’ll examine narrators who may not deserve our trust. We’ll investigate Poe’s hoaxes, puzzles, cryptograms, jokes, tricks, and literary sleights of hand. 

And I won’t always give you the answer. 

Where would be the fun in that? 

I’ll show you the evidence. 

You decide what Poe was up to. 

Welcome to Secrets of Poe. 

The investigation begins.