Under the Covers with Fortunato and Montresor BY JAN BURKE
Some years ago, I heard concern voiced over the fact that children seemed to adore a series of horror books written for that audience, and recently a parent told me she feared Harry Potter was “too intense” for her fifth-grader. I’m not a parent, so I would never attempt to judge what a child of today could cope with, but I do recall who scared the socks off me at the age of ten: Edgar Allan Poe.
Upon hearing how much I had enjoyed being terrified by “The Tell-Tale Heart,” my father suggested I read “The Cask of Amontillado.” It had been a while since he had read it, but as he said the name of the story, he gave a little shiver in reminiscence. Naturally, I hurried to search out a copy of the story. Like many young booklovers, I used to read with a flashlight under the bedcovers long after I was supposed to be asleep. For reasons you’ll understand as you read “The Cask of Amontillado,” those covers got tossed back when I read this one. For some weeks after I read it, I repaid my father the favor of his recommendation by refusing to sleep with the bedroom door closed.
Every time I’ve reread “The Cask of Amontillado” as an adult, I’ve found it’s still a tale guaranteed to incite claustrophobia. Now, though, I better appreciate how skillfully Poe told this tale. “The Cask of Amontillado” is a master’s lesson in storytelling. Every element-the voice of the narrator, the setting, the interplay between characters, even the clothing of the victim-contributes to its mood, its tension, and its relentless drive to its conclusion.
Consider how we are lured into a journey with a killer, much as Fortunato is lured into doing the same. At first, we feel sympathetic to Montresor. Who among us has not known a Fortunato and wished him his comeuppance? A pompous connoisseur of fine wines, he easily represents the know-it-alls we’ve encountered in our own lives. Perhaps we’ve also known someone who has dealt us a “thousand injuries” or insults we’ve been forced to bear in smiling silence.
Soon we realize, though, that Montresor is a madman, not to be trusted. He’s prone to exaggerating slights all out of proportion, and he’s bent on revenge. We begin to fear for Fortunato, dressed as a fool and behaving like one. We descend with this pair from the street, where the carnival season is in full swing, down into the catacombs beneath the Montresor palazzo. Every step inexorably takes us away from the excesses and frivolity of the celebrations above-down into a dark and chill place, where even the bells on a fool’s cap become fuelfor nightmares. We may have seen more graphically violent representations of the mind of a killer in fiction, but Montresor, capable of mocking both his victim’s prayers and his screams, is as heartless as any.
With the power of a conjurer, Poe knew exactly how to summon our fears. Read “The Cask of Amontillado.” Then feel free to sleep with the light on and the bedroom door open.
Jan Burke is the Edgar-winning author of twelve novels, including Bones, Flight, Bloodlines, and Kidnapped. Her newest is a supernatural thriller, The Messenger. She is currently at work on the next Irene Kelly novel.
The Curse of Amontillado BY LAWRENCE BLOCK
I knew I wanted an Edgar Award back in 1961, when my good friend Don Westlake failed to win one.
He’d just published The Mercenaries, and it was nominated for an Edgar for Best First Mystery. Someone else took home the statuette (for what was in fact a first mystery by a veteran science-fiction writer, which made it eligible under the letter if not the spirit of the rule), and we all assured Don that it was honor enough to be nominated, and he pretended to believe us. We don’t need to feel sorry for the man, though; he has a whole shelf full of those porcelain busts now, plus a sheaf of nominations. Anyway, this isn’t about him.
It’s about me.
I began publishing paperback original crime novels in 1961 and hardcovers a few years later. And while I can’t say I was obsessed with the idea of winning an Edgar, I had my hopes. One book I published in the mid-1970s, under a pen name (Chip Harrison) that was also the name of the book’s narrator, was dedicated “To Barbara Bonham, Newgate Callendar, John Dickson Carr, and the Edgar Awards Committee of the Mystery Writers of America.” Barbara Bonham was the chief fiction reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Newgate Callendar was the pen name that music critic Harold Schonberg used for his crime column in the New York Times Book Review. And John Dickson Carr, master of the locked room, reviewed mysteries for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
I was shameless, and to no avail. Well, not much avail anyway. The book got a mention in the Callendar column, where its dedication was quoted and its literary merits overlooked. Carr and Bonham paid no attention, and when Edgar time rolled around, Chip Harrison was left out in the cold.
But a year or so later one of my Matthew Scudder novels, Time to Murder and Create, picked up a nomination for Best Paperback Original. I went to the dinner somehow convinced I was going to win, and I didn’t. Someone else did. I sat there stunned, barely able to assure people that it was honor enough merely to be nominated.
A couple of years later I was nominated again, this time for Eight Million Ways to Die, short-listed for Best Novel. “Honor enough to be nominated,” I muttered and went home.
It took years for me to realize what was holding me back. It was, quite simply, a curse.
The curse of Amontillado.
I realized the precise dimensions of this curse only recently, when Charles Ardai was editing an early pseudonymous book of mine for his “Hard Case Crime” imprint. He pointed out that I’d referred to “The Cask of Amontillado” as having been written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Gently he asked if my attributing Poe’s story to Stevenson was deliberate, indicating something subtle about the character who’d made the error.
The mistake, I replied, was not the character’s but my own, and he should by all means correct it.
And not a moment too soon. Because it was clearly responsible for a long train of misfortunes.
This misattribution, I must confess, was not an isolated slip-ofthe-keyboard confined to a single forgettable book. While that may have been the only time I publicly handed Poe’s classic tale to Stevenson, I’d been confused about its authorship ever since I read the story. Which, if memory serves (and you can already tell what ill service it tends to provide), came about in the seventh grade, some fifty-seven years ago.
One of our textbooks in English class was a small blue volume of short stories, one of which was “The Cask of Amontillado,” and one was something by Stevenson. (I seem to recall the title of the Stevenson story as “The Master of Ballantrae,” but that’s impossible, because that’s the title of a novel. So I don’t know what the Stevenson story may have been, and, God forgive me, I don’t care either.)
I don’t know what else I may have retained from the seventh grade, but one thing I held on to was that story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
“Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”
They don’t write ’em like that anymore, and I knew that even then. But somehow I got it into my head that the author’s initials were R.L.S., not E.A.P. Now and then it would come up in conversation, and someone would say I meant Poe, didn’t I? And I’d say yes, of course, and stand corrected-but not for long, because my memory remained inexplicably loyal to Stevenson.
Well, really. Where did I get off looking to win an Edgar? If the Red Sox could go that long without a World Series win just because their cheapjack owner let go of Babe Ruth, what did I expect?