Books by Julian Symons

Sutherland House Classics is proud to bring back to print Julian Symons' The Tell-Tale Heart, an acclaimed and best-selling biography of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most influential authors in the English language. A highly-regarded mystery and crime writer in his own right, Symons is in a unique position to understand Poe's work and to sharply, thoroughly reveal the secrets of his life. He paints Poe as his contemporaries saw him: a man whose life was filled with tragedy and who struggled to make a living through his writing, only to emerge as a definitive voice in murder-and-madness fiction and the inventor of the detective story. More relevant than ever in our horror-obsessed times, The Tell-Tale Heart is the second volume in the Sutherland Classics series, which seeks to rediscover and reprint classic works of narrative non-fiction. "As absorbing and compelling as a good detective story." - Washington Post

The murder, a brutal stabbing, definitely took place on Guy Fawkes' night. It was definitely by the bonfire on the village green. There were definitely a number of witnesses. And yet, was it definitely clear to anybody exactly what they had seen? In the writhing, violent shadows, it seems as if the truth may have gone up in smoke.