While we represent as many decades as possible, and male and female sleuths and authors, we also chose our selections to show emotional range. We cover humour with Harte and Barnes, pathos with Glaspell and McBain. And we are sure that readers will have fun with Reeve's «The Beauty Mask,» in which the scientific jiggery-pokery is so dated that readers will find themselves chuckling even while being taken in by the earnestness with which it was written.
I join with Rosemary Herbert in the belief that we have fairly represented the evolution of the detective story in America. But our mission was to entertain as well as to educate. We trust that you will find this volume just plain fun to read.
Tony Hillerman, with Rosemary Herbert
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)
Although his life was short and tragic, Edgar Allan Poe is considered by a few to be the founder of American letters, by many to be the inventor of horror stories and fantasy novels, and by one and all to be the father of detective fiction. He was the child of two actors, orphaned as a tot, expelled from West Point, and rejected by his fiancée. He married his cousin and, after she died of tuberculosis, wed the original fiancée. Through much of his forty years, his health was poor.
Despite-or perhaps inspired by-his circumstances, Poe became a published poet at age twenty, and he served as editor of the «Southern Literary Messenger» until he was fired at age twenty-eight for drunkenness. By the time Poe wrote «The Murders in the Rue Morgue», when he was thirty-two, he was already well established with his literary criticism, magazine articles, short stories, and poetry.