Murder and mayhem abound in three suspenseful stories by Edgar Allan Poe, whose nineteenth-century writing left a lasting impact on the gothic and horror genres. On board a ship, a man watches on as his old friend appears increasingly disturbed. What luggage could be so precious that Cornelius Wyatt would leave it in a locked cabin? ‘The Oblong Box’ is a masterclass in mystery writing.

In ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, Italian carnival festivities are the perfect distraction for a man driven to bleak and bloody revenge. One of the earliest examples of the classic detective story is ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, a tale that is as violent as it is puzzling. Can Parisian detective Auguste Dupin figure out who killed Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter one July night? This series of pocket-sized paperbacks celebrates the art of the short story and marks Macmillan Collector’s Library’s 10th anniversary.

Each contains a curated selection of short stories from a literary giant: Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alice Dunbar Nelson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rabindranath Tagore.