Abstract
The Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza, who defined fiction as “the combining exercise of elements taken from tradition and put to work for story,” blends in his novels elements belonging to the detective and Gothic genres with the ultimate purpose of subverting them through satire. It is my purpose here to prove that one of Mendoza's referents is Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales and poems he affirms to have read at different points in his life. He overtly expressed his opinion about the American author who, he stated, deserves the highest praise for being the founder of the detective story genre and for the poetic atmosphere he created in his tales of mystery. This article is aimed at tracing the presence of E. A. Poe's works in Eduardo Mendoza's El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato (2008), where echoes of several of Poe's tales and poems can be seen.