In 1912, the first film called The Raven wrote Edgar Allan Poe as a character into one of his own works. Many subsequent books and films have sought to fill in the dark blanks in the author’s biography – no-one really knows what he did on the last few days of his life – with sensational fiction. This injects the down-on-his-luck poet into a mid-Victorian version of Se7en as he shows up at the scenes of gruesome crimes based on his own stories – a woman shoved up a chimney in a locked room, a critic cut in half by a pendulum, etc – and puzzles over clues set by a killer who's playing out the horrors that spring from the author’s head.