Turning Poe's mystery tales into movies
Though notoriously difficult to translate into workable screenplays, the works of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) have provided Hollywood and international filmmakers with a fertile source of story material. Be it his fiction or such poetic classics as "The Raven" (1845), Poe's works continue to inspire filmic imagery with a basis in the themes and ideas the author explored during his hectic career as one of America's first literary giants. Best known as one of initial and uniquely American fantasists and creator of horrors, as in "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" (both published in 1843), Poe is also recognized as the creator of modern detective fiction, the well-spring of deductive reasoning as the solution to murder and crime puzzles later expanded upon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes. For much of C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's occasional Paris-based sleuth whose fame lies in three stories, was worked by Holmes...