More recently, though, the 2017 PBS American Masters film, Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, downplayed the tortured image. “He comes off instead as a smart guy who wanted to become famous ...

Yet it was not always so. The roots of modern detective fiction go back over 150 years to a Boston-born master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. And the most shocking true-crime story in Poe's day ...