Introduction: Dreams and Mystifications of Poe; Part One: The Quixotic Quest for Literary Fame, Financial Stability, and a Republic of Letters in Antebellum America; Chapter 1: Poor Edgar's Almanac: E.A. Poe's Money Woes; Chapter 2: Outside Looking In: Poe and New York City; Looking in on Gotham; Letting Some Secrets of the New York Literati Out; Inside and Out: Revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado"; Chapter 3: Eddy P., the Scrivener: Biography and Autobiography in Herman Melville's "Story of Wall-Street"1.

Part Two: The Competition in Cunning: Ramifications of and Responses to Poe's Ratiocinative TalesChapter 4: Character Rivalry, Authorial Sleight of Hand, and Generic Fluidity in the Dupin Trilogy; The Murders in the Rue Morgue; The Mystery of Marie Rogêt; The Purloined Letter; Chapter 5: Varieties of Detection in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman's Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, and Mark Twain's "The Stolen White Elephant"; Roger Chillingworth: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Malevolent, Deluded Detective.

Successfully Combating Crime in Walt Whitman's Jack EngleAmasa Delano: Herman Melville's Anti-Dupin; Mark Twain's Purloined Critter; Chapter 6: Madness, Mystification, and "Average Racism" in "The Gold-Bug," E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter; Uniting a Divided Country by Means of "Average Racism" in "The Gold-Bug" and The Hidden Hand; Hiding in Plain Sight and Reversing the Rendering of Black and White Speech in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.