Free In the Shadow of the Master by Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Connelly

delicate dance between the romantic and the macabre, the real and the supernatural. And as a writer, now I could appreciate the complex construction of Poe’s puzzles and his use of what he called “the vivid effect” to grab the reader’s emotions. What modern storyteller worth her salt doesn’t strive to do that? All writers today-crime, horror, romance, yes, even literary – owe him a debt. My favorite author, Joyce Carol Oates, asks in the afterword of her short-story collection
Haunted:
“Who has not been influenced by Poe?” Oates herself wrote a Poe paean called “The Pluto's Heritage White Cat” in which a husband becomes murderously jealous of his wife’s Persian cat.
    Writers can learn much from him still.
    As for readers, there is much to savor in this sly little tale.
    First, it is a very modern detective story, but one in which you, the reader, must follow the bread-crumb trail of clues. Why did this man kill his wife? You have to peel back the psychological layers of the killer’s behavior-shades of
Silence of the Lambs
!-to find meaning for a brutal murder when none seems to exist.
    Second, it is a chilling study of domestic violence, perversity, and guilt. Compare it with its bookend story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the other great example in this collection. Both narrators deny that they are insane-but are they?
    Third, “The Black Cat” is one of the first stories to use “the unreliable narrator.” (This is when bias, instability, limited knowledge, or deliberate deceit makes the storyteller suspect.) With one line- “I neither expect nor solicit belief”-Poe paved the way for Nick Carraway in Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby,
the governess in Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw,
Dr. Sheppard in Agatha Christie’s
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
the cook in Dean Koontz’s
Odd Thomas,
and Teddy Daniels in Dennis Lehane’s
Shutter Island
.
    Fourth, “The Black Cat” is an early example of genre-crossing. Poe is known for horror, but in this story he blurs the line between realism and the supernatural. The paranormal, reincarnation, horror, mystery-it’s all there and more.
    And last? Well, it
is
the first cat mystery.
    Which brings us back to Pluto. Mine is still hale and hearty at fourteen. The fictional Pluto, of course, dies horribly. Which didn’t really bother me-until I started writing fiction. See, there’s an axiom among mystery writers: kill an animal and your readers will turn on you.
    Poe adored cats in real life. His beloved tabby Catarina even inspired him to write a scientific essay, “Instinct vs. Reason-A Black Cat.”
    Still, when he put pen to paper, he wasn’t afraid to kill the cat. You have to admire a writer who takes big risks.
     
    ***
     
    P. J. Parrish, a.k.a. Kristy Montee, is the author (with her sister Kelly Nichols) of two series of crime novels featuring biracial private eye Louis Kincaid and female homicide detective Joe Frye. Their books are
New York Times
best-sellers and have won awards from the Private Eye Writers of America and International Thriller Writers. Their short stories have appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
in Mystery Writers of America ’s anthologies, and in Akashic Books’
Detroit Noir.
Like Poe, Kris has a love of wine and cats, an appreciation of all that is grotesque and depressing, and a distrust of critics (even though she once earned a living as one). Unfortunately, that is the limit of her kinship to Poe-unless one counts the fact that her second book was nominated for an Edgar.

William Wilson
    “What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
    That spectre in my path?”
    – CHAMBERLAIN’S
PHARRONIDA

    LET ME CALL MYSELF, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn-for the horror-for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its