Short Story Review Edgar Allan Poe The Gold Bug

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1843 – Spoiler alerts An early Poe story and commercially, his most successful from during his lifetime. This is not a horror or fantasy work, but a treasure hunt story involving an obsessive search for the lost treasure of Captain Kidd the pirate on an island off the coast of South Carolina. The never named narrator is summoned to see his friend Legrand by a concerned manservant, a negro called Jupiter, who is afraid that the obsessive over-excitable Legrand might be crazy. The narrator learns that Legrand was bitten by an unusual gold coloured bug, which he has captured and killed, to get it examined as a possible new species. He has asked Jupiter to find some paper to wrap the bug in, and the parchment Jupiter has found proves to be a cryptic treasure map, written in code and invisible inks that only come to light if the paper is heated up. Much of the story involves Legrand cracking the code, and the careful depiction of this led to many other stories featuring cyphers as well as newspapers running code-puzzles for readers to solve. The story also inspired Robert Louis Stephenson to write Treasure Island. There are lots of unlikely coincidences, in that the bug bite leads to the finding of the parchment, Legrand just happens to be near a fire which brings the inks to light, he is easily able to reach the location of the treasure, one and a half million dollars in jewellery, and Jupiter uses the bug itself rather than a bullet in the final drop through a dead pirate’s skull in a particular tree’s high branches to locate the treasure’s resting place. Thrilling, but rather preposterous and by today’s standards quite racist in its depiction of Jupiter. Arthur Chappell