When I was fairly young, certainly no older than ten or twelve, my maternal grandmother used to slip me a very small glass of sherry now and again. Edna Herrington had lived through a war, rationing and my grandfather dying young on her and leaving her left to raise two teenage girls on a Burtons clothing factory wage, in a back to back council house in east Leeds, with communal outside toilets. By the time she was slipping me tiny glasses of sherry she was living in a council tower block that had replaced the back to backs, with internal plumbing.

Edna lived through a lot, smoked 20 Embassy Number One’s a day and sipped her way through a bottle of sherry a month. Slightly more if she had one of the grandkids staying over night… Some time after this, once all the grand kids were adults and had left their respective homes, Edna’s mind started slipping, and she moved in with my mum and dad for a few moths but the night my mum woke tup to find her mother stood over her husband holding a knife and saying she had to kill him before he killed them, my parents decided with heavy hearts that there may be some wisdom in finding her a care home.

Grandma Edna loved my father, he was her favourite son in law. Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease with no logic to it at times.

But as I say, long before the disease took my grandma from me and replaced her with a slightly mad old woman living in the past, she used to slip me tiny glasses of sherry when ever I stayed the night in her flat. To the child I was, this was a rich strange tasting forbidden fruit… Almost certainly given so I would actually go to sleep…

I have never drunk sherry since, as such I would not know a fine Amontillado from any other sherry. Something in which I am not alone…

In this grim tale of revenge by our Dear Edgar, the promise of sampling a cask of Amontillado is used by the protagonist Montresor to lure his intended victim Fortunato to his grotesque doom. Fortunato considers himself to be a connoisseur of fine wine, though just how true this may be is debateable. At several points in the story he betrays a degree of ignorance, not least when admonishes another noble man as unable to tell the difference between Amontillado and Sherry. Unless Poe himself was unaware they were one in the same, which seems unlikely, it portrays Fortunato as been a social upstart and a drunkard. This is however, the least of his sins in the eyes of Montresor.

At some point in the past Fortunato had wronged Montresor, at least in the eyes of Montresor. What exactly has had done to deserve his fate is never entirely explained. Fortunato, blissfully unaware of this long held vendetta, considers Montresor to be a old friend and trusted ally. Trusted enough that Fortunato openly admits to Montresor he is a Freemason, and seems surprised that Montresor isn’t, at least he has no knowledge of freemasonry, masonry on the other hand…

This is far from the first time Poe has told a story from a murders perspective. Most notably he does so in The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat, but also to an extent the early stories like Berenice do much the same. But in those cases the madness of the perpetrator is fully on display. They are to an extent windows into insane minds. In this case however if Montresor is insane it is the cold calculated insanity of a psychopath, rather than the fractured minds encountered in other Poe stories. Montresor at no point comes across as insane at least in regards to the way Poe normally writes insanity. Instead he seems merely coldly and callously driven to enact his revenge.

As revenges go, this is unquestionably brutal. Lured, while drunk, by the opportunity to sample a fine cask of Amontillado and plied with other wines along the way, Fortunato, who is far from fortunate, is led through the bowls of the Montresor family home, through wine cellars and catacombs. Into a dark alcove deep in the furthest cellar, where he is chained to the wall in a drunken stupor and starts to come round as his host proceeds to wall him in alive. All the while listening to Fortunato’s pleading to be released as he finally realises this is not all some wildly elaborate practical joke.

This is a cold end to a chilling tale. Unlike Poe’s other tales of murders, Montresor faces neither justice nor indeed his own guilt. There is only the tinniest of suggestions of him experiencing any guilt at all right at the end, which he then dismisses as a reaction to the dampness of the catacombs. Oddly, or perhaps not, because Montresor faces no crisis of guilt, and remains uncaught, this feels a more chilling tale than Poe’s other stories. Montresor is a murderer who you could pass in the street with no inclination of his psychotic nature. It is grotesque in ways Dear Edgars other tales are not. Rather than obvious signs of insanity he is a companionable murderer, with a refined taste and sensibilities plying his victim with drink and massaging his ego, before committing his cold callous crime. Montresor is in a way a precursor of Hannibal Lector, only without the cannibalism.

A refined killer who acts without pity, who seems sane even which committing insanities.

A TRUE MURDER OF RAVENS

Should you read it: Yes, it is dark and chilling and tangibly horrific, and Poe at his best

Blaggers fact: Reputedly Poe’s inspiration for this story came from a barrack-house legend he heard while stationed at Fort Independence in his army days. After a dual over a card game that left a much admired officer dead, the men of the fort took revenge on his killer by getting the other officer drunk, then chaining him in the depths of the fort and walling him in. However, while Edgar may well have heard the tale in the barracks, it was entirely a fabrication. While the dual did take place, the surviving office was acquitted of murder and was still alive some thirty years later, when Poe put pen to paper to write this tale.

He did die that year however…

Now I think I am going to buy a bottle of Sherry, and have a small tipple to the memory of Edna, as fine a Grandma as a boy could ever wish for. In the meantime, support Alzheimer’s research, or just find out more at https://www.alzheimers.org.uk