The Tell-Tale Told

Whether you were celebrating Martin Luther King Day or Dubyah’s last official hours in office, yesterday was the bicentenary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth. For many Poe is known for his tales of the macabre. My first introduction to his work was through the lurid Roger Corman-produced adaptations of The Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death, scripted by Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, and all starring Vincent Price.

After reading The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, each told from the murder’s point of view, I came to what was for me Poe’s significant works. With The Murders in the Rue Morgue, first published in 1841, Poe introduced his readership to what is considered to be the first work of detective fiction as opposed to mystery fiction. In C. Auguste Dupin, who investigates the inexplicable brutal slayings of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, Poe laid down the template for the great amateur detective.

Like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot and everyone else who would follow, Dupin’s interest in the case would not be for any monetary gain but simply because the mysterious circumstances of the crime piqued his interest and solving the conundrum was an amusement to him. In that first tale and both The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter, which appeared in print over the next few years, Poe established the first-person narration by a close ally, the blundering police officials that would ultimately become a foil for the detective, and, most importantly, the literary device of announcing the solution to the crime before working backwards to establish the mechanics behind the evildoing.


All these tropes would soon become familiar in the years that followed. With this is mind there should have been something on last night to celebrate this wonderful dark beginning. Instead there was the final part of Hunter. This might have been interesting because it featured Hugh Bonneville and wonderful Janet McTeer reprising their roles from Gwyneth Hughes’ 2007 crime drama Five Days. Except the pair were wasted in a tale that pretty much brushed over their characters in favour of an average seen-it-all-before procedural that featured a trio of idiotic Pro-Life killers.

Frankly I would have preferred to watch two hours of Bonneville’s DSI Iain Barclay indulging in his love of astronomy – the drama’s title referring to his favourite constellation of Orion – and McTeer’s faintly sozzled DS Amy Foster lounging in the bath. In the comments a few posts back, when I was mouthing off about Linda La Plante’s utterly rancid Under Suspicion, The Wonderful Woo said

“What's the point in a crime thriller when the perp is obvious from halfway through part one? That's two hours I won't get back. Should we have a two-year moratorium on any cop shows?”

Obviously Hunter had been made before her announcement and slipped in under the wire, but isn’t she absolutely right about this? At the moment it seems that the only real locked room mystery is how the writer inside is allowed to come up with carbon copy junk like this.