Edgar Allan Poe's experiments in crime and cryptography fiction can be seen to date from 1840 and "The Man Of The Crowd" — a crime story without a crime — and reach their perfect expression in his trilogy of tales involving Parisian detective Auguste Dupin: "Murders In The Rue Morgue", "The Mystery Of Marie Rogét", and "The Purloined Letter", works which created and established detective fiction as a genre.

THE VERY EYE OF DEATH collects these classic stories along two others: '"Thou Art The Man"' (1844) was Poe moving crime fiction from Paris to a grotesque and burlesque rural America, while "The Gold Bug" (1843), a treasure-hunt littered Mith human bones, was inspired by positive reaction to Poe's articles on cryptography in Graham 's Magazine.

Together, these six stories of guilt, murder, subterfuge and "ratiocination" form Poe's complete investigation into a zone where human carnage and concealment inspires others to new heights of intellectual imagination — an affirmation of life through the very eye of death.