A Look Back At Poe In Philadelphia: My Philadelphia Weekly 'Crime Beat' Column On Edgar Allan Poe's Creative Peak In Philly

Back in May of 2021, Philadelphia Weekly published my Crime Beat column on Edgar Allan Poe's time in Philadelphia.

I interviewed Scott Peeples (seen in the below photo), author of Man in the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City.

You can read the column via the pages below (click on them to enlarge), the below link, or the below text:

How Philly shaped Edgar Allan Poe's pessimistic poetry - Philadelphia Weekly

Poe in Philadelphia: 

Edgar Allan Poe Had Creative Peak While Living in Philly 

By Paul Davis  

I visited Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Philadelphia on a school trip many years ago. I revisited the historical house in my twenties when I was rereading and enjoying Poe, especially “The Murders on the Rue Morgue,” which is credited as the very first detective crime story. 

I recently read Scott Peeples’ “The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City,” which covers Poe’s time in Richmond, Baltimore, New York, and of course Philadelphia. Scott Peeples, a professor of English at the College of Charleston, also co-edited, with J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe,” and he wrote two other books on Poe as well. 

I reached out to Peeples and asked him about Poe’s time in Philadelphia, which was from 1838 to 1844. 

“In some ways, it was the most stable period of his adult life,” Peeples replied.” That’s not saying much, but still, Poe lived in the same house for about four of the six years in Philadelphia, which was very unusual for him. And he had steady employment for a few years, as editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and then Graham’s Magazine. He got to know a lot of other writers and editors; he met Charles Dickens when Dickens toured the city. 

“Poe even came close to launching his own magazine, something that he greatly desired. But he never made a lot of money, and then in 1842 his wife Virginia began showing symptoms of tuberculosis. Poe’s mother-in-law, who was also his aunt, lived with Edgar and Virginia, and the three of them moved a couple of times between 1842 and ’44, before finally leaving for New York. During that last year or so Poe began drinking more, and his wife’s illness weighed heavily on him. So things were pretty shaky by the time he left Philadelphia.” 

I asked what significant work Poe produced while living in Philadelphia. 

“It was his creative peak --- I think that would be hard to argue with. He wrote and published most of the stories he’s best known for today: “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Man of the Crowd,” and more,” Peeples said. “He wrote a lot of satirical fiction as well, and a steady stream of book reviews.” 

Peeples described Poe’s house, which is now the National Historic Site on Spring Garden Street, as relatively spacious considering how little money the family had. 

“It was attached to a much larger house owned by his landlord, but Poe’s place was a pretty nice little home on the outskirts. Apparently, the landlord admired Poe as a writer and didn’t really worry too much about the rent.”  

Peeples said Poe moved to Philadelphia in the wake of the Panic of 1837, as the city was trying to bounce back from a recession. 

“Even so, it was growing pretty quickly --- not at the speed of New York, but definitely expanding,” Peeples said. “Some impressive new public buildings were going up --- Eastern State Penitentiary, the Second Bank of the US, the US Mint, the Philadelphia Arcade --- but at the same time back lots were getting filled in with smaller, shoddier houses. It probably felt kind of chaotic, despite the city’s image as the Quaker City with the orderly grid of streets.  There were labor disputes and riots, including the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 by a racist mob, because they had hosted an abolitionist lecture. And the city published a lot of newspapers and magazines, and that was probably the main thing that drew Poe to Philadelphia in the first place.” 

Peeples said he wrote “Man of the Crowd” to show how much Poe engaged with the places he lived. 

“Poe lived an itinerant life --- he moved from city to city and within cities very frequently, largely because he was never financially secure. Cities shaped Poe’s life and career, and that was something I wanted to explore.”   

Peeples said Poe’s work has endured for many reasons. 

“Poe’s stories are more than creepy --- they confront some basic human questions in unsettling ways: what’s it like to be dead? why am I my own worst enemy? Poe’s posthumous image --- to some extent the one I’m implicitly challenging with this book --- took on a life of its own, as he sort of became the face of gothic horror in the twentieth century, thanks to comic books, movies, and a lot of other adaptations.” 

Paul Davis’ Crime Beat column appears here each week. You can contact him via pauldavisoncrime.com. 

Hire A Vet: Military Veterans As Armed Guards Can Hlep Ensure School Safety

 Broad + Liberty posted my piece on hiring military veterans as armed guards in schools. You can read the piece via the below link or below text:

Paul Davis: Military veterans as armed guards can help ensure school safety (broadandliberty.com)

The mass school shootings in Nashville, Philadelphia and other places across the country are becoming far too common. 

The left believes gun control is the answer. Removing guns from would-be shooters (and everyone else) will stop school shootings. The right believes that mental health is the true issue. Stricter measures to prevent the mentally ill from obtaining guns is the solution. 

While the issues are debated, children in schools need better protection. What I learned from performing security work while serving in the Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian, is that rings of security make a location truly safe. Most schools have security measures, such as locked doors and alarm systems, but in my view, schools should add another vital ring of security, armed guards.

When an active shooter forces his/her way into a school, alarm systems are activated or a 911 call is made, and the police usually respond quickly. But in those precious minutes, the shooter has already killed and wounded several victims. 

Armed guards should be stationed in all schools. They are on the spot and can immediately encounter the shooter and save lives. And the best armed guards that schools can hire are former police officers as well as military veterans. Like the advertisements stated some years ago, “Hire a Vet.” 

Schools should tap into the pool of unemployed military veterans. Like former police officers, military veterans are proficient in firearms and trained in firearm safety. Many of them are combat veterans. Visible armed guards make schools a hard target that a shooter, even a crazy one, will want to avoid.

Pennsylvanian Senator Mike Regan has come out for hiring armed guards for schools. On March 30th, Senator Regan, a retired U.S. Marshal, released an op-ed that calls for armed security in schools.

“In Pennsylvania, we have taken steps to implement and improve school security measures, but if we have learned anything with each school shooting, it is that every school must be prepared for the worst and to do that, they must meet a certain level of security mandated across the Commonwealth,” Senator Regan stated. 

“Over the last ten years, I have led the charge in the Senate on the issue of school safety. Legislation that I sponsored created a School Safety Committee within the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) and a School Safety and Security Grant Program to provide schools the financial resources to hire school police or resource officers and to purchase equipment or make physical changes to their buildings in order to keep their schools safe and secure. However, with each tragic attack on a school, I am reminded of the pushback I faced on my original proposal to require armed security.” 

The senator noted that school superintendents and school boards demand local control and some are resistant to the concept of having armed security. 

“This defies commonsense, especially when we have industry experts stating that such officers are the first step schools should take to prevent a tragedy like those that continue to happen needlessly across our country. The sad truth is that individuals are now specifically targeting schools – and especially schools they know are easily accessible and not well-secured. Early reports out of Nashville indicate that the shooter considered targeting another school but was deterred by the level of security there.

“Ensuring our students are fully protected while they are at school needs to be a top priority. That is why I am renewing my call for requiring every school to have armed officers on site, who are not only there in case of emergency but can also serve as trusted resources for students and be the eyes and ears on the ground to alert proper authorities to changes in behavior,” Senator Regan stated. 

“My perspective on this issue comes from my career in the U.S. Marshal Service. Part of my responsibilities was to secure federal buildings. I have also relied on other credentialed experts in the field of school and building security as I crafted legislative proposals over the years, and they have all said with uniformity that the hiring of trained and vetted armed officers should be every school’s first step when implementing security measures. But still, many have not.”

Senator Regan wrote that many of Pennsylvania’s schools have already taken the necessary steps to implement both baseline criteria, which includes employing school security, be it school police officers, school resource officers, or school security guards. 

“But the time has come for all to recognize that this is a must in today’s world. Let’s not allow another tragedy to occur or another ten years to pass by without taking necessary action. The lives of our young people – and their bright futures – depend on it.”. 

I agree. I believe that only armed guards in schools can truly stop the tragic and senseless mass school shootings. And military veterans make the best armed guards. 

Paul Davis is a Philadelphia writer who covers crime.

My Crime Beat Column: Hemingway On Crime

I wrote about Hemingway and crime in my online Crime Beat column in 2009.

You can read the column below:

In Ellery Queen's Book of Mystery Stories, first published under the title The Literature of Crime, the crime stories presented in the collection are written by writers generally not recognized as crime, mystery or thriller writers.

Edited by Ellery Queen, the pseudonym of the writing team of Frederic Dannay and James Yaffe, as well as the name of their fictional detective character, the book offers crime stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and a dozen other writers.

Included in the collection is a classic crime story by Ernest Hemingway called The Killers. The short story is one of my favorites and it is perhaps Hemingway’s best short story.

“Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers is one of the best known short stories ever written and no volume dedicated to the literature of crime would be complete without it,” the editors wrote in the introduction to the story.

“It is revealing nothing new about Hemingway to point out that essentially he is preoccupied with doom - more specifically, with death. It has been explained this way: ‘The I in Hemingway stories is the man that things are done to’ - and the final thing that is done to him, as to all of us, is death. No story of Hemingway illustrates this fundamental thesis more clearly than The Killers; nor does any story of Hemingway’s illustrate more clearly why he is a legend in his own lifetime. Here, in a few pages, is the justly famous Hemingway dialogue - terse, clipped, the quintessence of realistic speech; here in a few pages, are more than the foreshadowings of the great literary qualities to be found in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Hemingway covered crime as a young reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917. The following year he volunteered to be an ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I after being rejected by the U.S. Army due to poor eyesight.

He was wounded, returned home and he soon after began covering crime and other subjects for The Toronto Star Weekly. Hemingway credited his sparse, tough style of writing to his working for those newspapers with their quick deadlines. Hemingway By-Line offers a good collection of his newspaper and magazine pieces.

In his journalism, novels and short stories, Hemingway covered crime, love and war, hunting, fishing and bull-fighting. In addition to The Killers, he wrote other short stories about crime and he also wrote a good, tough crime novel called To Have and Have Not.

Humphrey Bogart portrayed Hemingway’s tough-guy hero, Harry Morgan, in the film version of the novel. Bogart, of course, also portrayed crime fiction’s iconic characters Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

I heard Elmore Leonard, one of our best contemporary crime writers, tell his audience at the Philadelphia Free Library some months ago that Hemingway had been a main influence on him (although he lamented that Hemingway lacked a sense of humor). Many other crime writers, as well as writers of all stripes, list Hemingway as a major influence. 

I do as well.

I devoured crime fiction and thrillers as a teenager. I read Ian Fleming, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ed McBain, to name but a few. I also read literary fiction and Hemingway’s novels were a favorite of mine.

After serving two years on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, I was stationed on a Navy tugboat at the U.S. nuclear submarine base in Holy Loch, Scotland for two years. I was in my early 20s then and I discovered Hemingway’s short stories, which I liked even better than his novels. 

I was pleased that some of them, like The Killers and The Battler were first-rate crime stories.

I traveled throughout the United Kingdom and Europe during those years. I visited Italy, France and Spain, which were the settings for many of Hemingway’s stories. While traveling across Europe I always carried what we called in the Navy an “AWOL” bag. In the small carry-all bag, among my toilet articles and a change or two of clothes, were several Penguin paperbacks books.

I loved those classic orange and white paperbacks and I still have many of them today. I bought and read Penguin’s Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess novels, Mark Twain’s travel books, and many other classic books. I carried several of these paperbacks in my AWOL bag, along with Hemingway’s Penguin paperback short story collections, such as Men Without Women and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. I read and reread these great stories.

Except for his tragic end, Hemingway led what many writers consider the ideal writer’s life. He was successful, wealthy and popular. He had the freedom to travel the world and hunt and fish, drink and talk in bars, and cover what interested him.

Hemingway covered wars, crime, sporting events and other happenings - and then returned home to write about his adventures.

Hemingway truly loved the sea and he lived near the ocean in Key West, Florida and later in Cuba. I visited his home in Key West some years back and I hope to one day visit his home in Cuba once the communists are finally kicked off the island.

Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961, but he lives on with his novels and stories. His family is releasing a newly-edited version of A Moveable Feast and there are two major film productions in the works about his work and his life.

Hemingway is influencing yet a new generation of writers and readers.

“Courage is grace under pressure,” Hemingway once wrote.

He also wrote “A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

Craig Johnson On His Walt Longmire Crime Novels And His Philadelphia Connection

Back in October of 2021, I interviewed Craig Johnson, the author of the Walt Longmire crime novels, for my Philadelphia Weekly Crime Beat column.

You can read the column below: 

Note: You can click on the above to enlarge.