Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, BBC Four

The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.

With Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” throbbing away in the background, our narrator, the Scottish crime novelist Denise Mina, embarked on her trawl through a life as brimming over with foreboding and menace as any of the man’s stories or poems. Back in 19th-century America, wasting diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis ran rife and unchecked, and sufferers could spend years in a ghastly hinterland between life and death, so it was perhaps inevitable that a writer like Poe would come along and turn such tragic banalities into transcendent fiction.

In fact, because of the shallow breathing these illnesses provoked, the fear of the premature burial of which Poe made such chilling use was a very real fear. We are also informed that fear of death in general was on the rise due to the fact that more and more holes were being blown in the once reassuring Christian myth that there might be a rosier future beyond this veil of tears.

It is easy to impose a Freudian interpretation retrospectively onto any life, but in the case of Poe it would be foolish not to. If this documentary is anything to go by, every woman in his life served either as a replacement for another, or to fill a role Poe had already conjured from his dankly fertile imagination: the resurrected mother figure, the virgin, the unobtainable goddess – all archetypes that needed a flesh-and-blood representative in his world. The pattern began with the death of his actress mother when he was only three and she only 24. Poe spent the rest of his life tracking down any reviews he could find of her acting career, presumably revelling in reports of her incomparable beauty and talent, despite the fact that, at the time, you may as well have been a whore as an actress for the respect granted you by society.

Then there was the marriage to his 13-year-old first cousin, Virginia Clemm. Such a dubious (in more respects than one) union was not uncommon at the time, and in fact the couple were blissfully happy until Virginia lost her protracted battle with tuberculosis seven years later. During the five years she fought the disease, despite drinking heavily, Poe produced many of his most famous and successful works, such as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Raven. So if we are to believe this documentary, women brought mainly misery, pain and heartache, but also grist to Poe’s satanic mill.

There were few happy endings in either his life or fiction, but at least his fiction gave him a necessary place to escape to and exorcise his anger and fears. Just as Poe left the best twist in his stories until the end, you may be interested to learn that life – or rather death – did the same for Poe. On the night of his death he stumbled out of The Horse You Came In On (which at the time sold opium and heroin as well as booze) into the Baltimore night, dressed, for reasons unknown, in another man’s clothes. He died a few days later without regaining sufficient consciousness to shed any light on his condition.

This wasn’t strictly speaking the drama-documentary it was billed as, because although the four core women in Poe’s life were on-screen presences, the actresses involved were only called upon to read to a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, and - in the case of Lucille Sharp as Virginia Poe - to cough a bit to convey that she would soon die of tuberculosis. While the performances were adequate, it was the story gleaned from between the lines of poems, letters and stories that gave insight into the mind of the man credited with inventing sci-fi, the detective novel and the psychological thriller. Despite location footage from old Poe haunts such as Baltimore, Richmond and New York, Louise Lockwood’s film had the modest production values of an Open University programme. But the words and the story more than compensate for the lack of visual flair.

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