Beyond Rue Morgue (2013)

Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology:
Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe's 1st Detective (2013)

Editors: Paul Kane / Charles Prepolec | Authors (in the order presented): Edgar Allan Poe / Mike Carey / Simon Clark / Weston Ochse + Yvonne Navarro / Jonathan Maberry / Joe R. Lansdale / Elizabeth Massie / Lisa Tuttle / Stephen Volk / Clive Barker | Page Count: 332 

"Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic."

The detective in Edgar Allan Poe's short story Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, was used by the author in two more of his works, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) and later The Purloined Letter (1844). Considered the world of literature's first mystery detective, Dupin was solving horrific crimes long before either Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot.

Famously, the word 'detective' hadn't even been coined when Poe penned his first Dupin mystery. His crime-solver used what the author called 'ratiocination'. But you can read about all of that in the book's introduction, so I won't spend any more time on it. Commenting on the stories in the pictured book is why I'm here. As the full title says, it's 'further tales' of Dupin, written by a number of different authors and in a number of different styles.

If what I gather from the colophon page is accurate, it seems that besides Poe's original story, which opens the book, only one of the included works had been published previously anywhere else, namely Clive Barker's New Murders in the Rue Morgue, which had been in his own Books of Blood: Volume Two (1986) short story collection. Incidentally, it ends the book, so the first and last were available elsewhere, with everything in-between being new and/or exclusive.

I'm not going to document each individual work, but will state that collectively they continue the detective's legacy in a number of ways - either directly, or though latter-day descendants.

There's a bold attempt by one author to merge the macabre worlds of Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The merger didn't work for me, personally, but other readers may disagree.

Most of the featured authors respect the original story, delivering a first-person narrative that stays close to the literary style and considered language that Poe himself used, whereas others take the opposite route and write in a more modern style. It's perhaps a coincidence, but the works that take the former approach are more often than not the better ones. Nevertheless, while not all of the stories were works that I'd recommend to fellow fans of Poe, each of them (with one exception - see below) were well-written, so respect to all concerned for that.

NOTE: the exception is The Purloined Face, which I quit reading partway through when it was suggested in a footnote that it followed on from a previous short in an earlier anthology named Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2011), a book that I've not read.