The Trial by Franz Kafka

Gustav Janouch, a friend of Franz Kafka, once angered the author by referring to Edgar Allan Poe as a notorious drunkard. Kafka responded that Poe "was a poor devil who had no defenses against the world…. He wrote tales of mystery to make himself at home in the world."

What an odd way of describing the mystery genre!—an idiom obsessed with crime, bloodsh…