Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre and father of the detective story. Even two centuries later, Poe could have been describing one of his young readers, book in hand, when he wrote, "The beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst," in "The Telltale Heart." His stories are among those most frequently read aloud in living rooms and around campfires. They fascinate, thrill and trouble sleep, most of all because Poe's narrators, the voices that listeners identify with, are not the victims but the often mad murderers.

The year of Poe's birth, 1809, was also the year that Isaac Hill of Concord commenced publication of the New Hampshire Patriot, a predecessor to the Monitor. But unlike much of the arts and literature of the day, Poe's work has a timeless appeal.

Poe's detective, Auguste Dupin, is the prototype for all who followed, from Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Perot and Nero Wolfe to Perry Mason and Jessica Fletcher. Poe published the first detective story, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," in 1841 and wrote just two more, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." But they were enough to give birth to a whole new genre of fiction.

Poe is also credited with crafting the first story that revolves around cryptography. In "The Gold Bug" William Legrand, a New Orleans man who loses his wealth, moves to Sullivan Island off South Carolina, comes into the possession of a scrap of paper bearing a series of characters and numbers.

"Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve," Poe wrote in an essay on secret writing written before "The Gold Bug." And so it was that Legrand - but no, we dare not spoil so great a tale for those few who may not have read it.

Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, and died in Baltimore in 1849. He loathed his city of birth, where his father had abandoned him and his mother was briefly forced to prostitute herself to feed her children, and loathed it all the more because the city's snobby critics savaged his works, including one that became one of America's most famous poems, "The Raven." Boston is beginning to rediscover Poe, and some fans, in a ghoulish campaign the writer might admire, are fighting to have his body exhumed and buried in Boston. But today in Baltimore, roses and cognac will be placed on Poe's grave, as they are every year, to celebrate a writer who gave the world so much shivery pleasure. And in memoriam, true fans will take a worn book off the shelf and read yet again one of Poe's masterpieces.