From Consumption Comes Noir

Recognize that handsome mustache? He’s the man that made your nightmares. He made black birds spooky. He put you in the pit. He placed you beneath the pendulum. The evidence of his ingeniousness still swings back and forth above you. The anxiety of his insanity still haunts you in the heart. His works can be compared “to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping of the veil.” — Brian Allen Carr

Baron von Bullshit

But often forgotten is that Poe is also the originator of the detective story. His “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” pre-dates Carroll John Daly’s earliest endeavor by 80 years. And while Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin is not a wise-cracking private eye, so often seen in earliest hard boiled and Noir works, he is the original crime solver. And — Poe’s still alive! Oh, no, that’s just Isaac Brock.

All this month we here at Dark Sky Magazine have been bringing you the finest Noir-influenced fiction and poetry we can get our hands on. And while, in many cases, we trended toward work that is only spiced by the dark, we have tried to showcase a wide selection of styles that the bad has been breathed upon.

Now, it would be haphazard to say that all things dark stem from Poe. Beowulf scared the shit out of us, and that was written before they wrote things; back then they just had to remember a certain jingle jangle in their brains. But the mark of Poe’s dark and drunken influence has thrown a staining stamp upon the lit world. This, of course, is common knowledge. All writers are hedonistic ruffians, right? Hard to say. Shakespeare worked on the Bible. If you look at American Literature pre-Poe you see a bunch of tight-pantsed Christians howling, and post-Poe you get the hooliganery of Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the various drunken emulators.

A Close Shave

But the detective story and the drunkenness are secondary in infamy to Poe’s quasi-demonic mystique. Barely anyone remember that C. Auguste Dupin solved the case of the razor-wielding orangutan. Some remember that Poe died face-down in a Baltimore gutter. But most everyone knows that Poe = scary.

Perhaps this is because Poe himself did not hold the detective genre he created in very high esteem.

Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity  to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious–but people think they are more ingenious than they are–on account of the method and air of method.

But you can’t take Poe’s self analysis at face value. He was an asshole. Nicknamed ‘The Tomahawk,’ it is hard to imagine that anyone with his personal history would not be a bit on the pessimistic side. We will give you a brief biography here, but to see a great brief biography go get yourself a copy of Gigantic II, wherein Michael Kimball gives us “Edgar Allan Poe, As Told in the First-Person and Today’s Language, Even Though I’m dead.” But we digress.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809. His father disappeared. His mother died of tuberculosis. He went to live with John Allan and his wife. Allan’s wife caught tuberculosis. Poe watched her cough herself to death. Simultaneously he watched John Allan bring other women into the house to bang. Poe got sent of to school. He accrued massive gambling debts. He joined the army. John Allan died and left Poe nothing. Poe’s fiancee left him because John Allan left him nothing. Poe married his 13 year old cousin (some say 14 but who knows) Virginia Clemm. Virginia got tuberculosis. Poe wrote “The Raven.” It made him famous, but only brought him $14. Virginia died. Poe slept around. He was about to marry the fiancee who earlier in his life left him (she had been previously married, but her husband died). She wanted Poe to sign a pre-nup. Poe refused. She left him again. Poe drank. Poe drugged. Poe died in 1949 in Baltimore. The cause of death was listed as congestion of the brain.

That’s a whole lot of what-the-fuck for a forty year old to have gone through. It kind of makes us sad for him. We think we’ll sing him a song.

Video: Cheer up Poe, It Could Be Worse