In the beginning tales were considered the start of Detective Fiction according to Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert in the book they wrote titled "The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories." This is an excellent book that contains several short stories by well-known writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, Anna Katharine Green, who is considered the Mother of Detective Fiction, Mignon G. Eberhart, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and others.
The story I read for this article, "The Tell-Tale Heart," doesn't appear in the book, but it is an excellent story written by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Tell-Tale Heart" was published in 1843. It is written in first person by the one who committed the crime. The story is about an elderly man who was lying in bed. Throughout the story, the first person narrator kept mentioning the elderly man's evil eye. He called it an evil eye or vulture eye. The intruder was disturbed about the man's evil eye. The intruder kept sticking his head in the room every night at midnight. Finally, one night, he opened the door and heard the elderly man cry out, "Who's there?" The intruder said nothing and entered the room quietly. Suddenly, he heard the man groan of pain or grief. The intruder kept hearing the elderly man's heart sound louder and louder. He didn't want the neighbor's to hear anything, so he had to do something. The intruder pulled the man off the bed and pulled the heavy bed over the man so the loudness of the man's heart would be muffled. Within a few minutes, he realized the man was dead. He thought everything would be all right now. However, the police were called to the case because a neighbor did hear something coming from the house. The intruder had to think of something to do with the body.
Now, you'll have to read this short story to find out what happened to the intruder. What did he do with the body? Did the police enter the house? Was he caught?
This was a good short story. It is quite different from today's Detective Fiction. This particular story is like a psychological thriller or suspense. I kept wanting to read the story to find out what happened and why the narrator was disturbed about the man's evil eye. The story has a very interesting twist at the end. Reader's will be surprised as to the ending.
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