Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe
Creator of the Modern Detective Story
From The Purloined Letter to the 21st Century
Mystery Genre
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Edgar Allan Poe is best known today for his
gothic stories of psychological horror.
However, his most enduring legacy in the world of
literature is the single-handed creation of
detective fiction and what he called,
ratiocination the process of logical
reasoning used by his fictional detective,
Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin.
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Dupin, a Frenchman, was the star of Poes three
true detective stories The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The
Purloined Letter.
In these three short stories, Poe created the
most common conventions of the genre

• The icon of the brilliant, solitary, amateur
  sleuth

• The slightly dim companion of the detective

• The friend also narrates the story

• The conventional, bumbling police

Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin Dupin was never
described physically, as the focus was meant to
be Dupins mental powers. Most literary experts
consider Dupin to be Poe himself.

• The locked room mystery

• The device of hidden in plain sight

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A Brief History of Crime and Writing
Before Poe created detective fiction in the 19th
century, there was very little crime fiction.
Why did it take so long?
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• For most of human history, crime was the same
  as sin
• Also, law enforcement was concerned with
  enforcing the privilege (private law) of the
  ruling classes. Sheriffs and other agents were
  answerable only to the aristocracy or the
  monarch, not the abstract of justice.

• The heroes of crime were the criminals like
  Robin Hood - who were stealing from the
  oppressive rulers.
• Torture was the accepted method of finding
  culprits
• The punishment for crime was most often maiming
  or execution

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• The Age of Reason (The Enlightenment) gave rise
  to the idea that everyone should be equal under
  the law, from the poorest to the most powerful.
  People began to think that torture was immoral
  and unreliable.

• By the 19th century, the ideas of the
  Enlightenment had trickled down to the masses.

• The scientific method was being developed,
  creating the idea that criminal convictions
  should be based on more than circumstantial
  evidence.

• The Industrial Revolution gave rise to larger
  urban populations, which created the opportunity
  for anonymous crime.

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• The Newgate Calendar, or, Malefactors Bloody
  Register from 1700 to the Present Time was
  published in 1773. Newgate was one of the most
  notorious British prisons, and The Newgate
  Calendar was a collection of sensational
  confessions from condemned criminals.

• In 1778, the Bow Street Runners were formed as
  an information-gathering unit, which lasted until
  1829

Bow Street Runner Headquarters

• In 1827, the anonymous and fictional account of
  Richmond or, Scenes from the Life of a Bow
  Street Runner, drawn up from his Private
  Memoranda is published.

• In 1829, Sir Robert Peel created the first
  British police force over some public protest.

• 1828-1829, François-Eugène Vidocq publishes
  Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French
  Police Until 1827.

A Peeler or Bobbie
François-Eugène Vidocq
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Until there were police, until there was interest
in and understanding of the scientific method,
until the concept of innocent until proven
guilty, until there were detectives There could
be no detective fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was
fortunate, in so far as his literary legacy, to
be living in a time ripe for the first detective
stories. But was the public ready?
Yes
Illustration for The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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Poes Influences
Poe was very familiar with French literature and
it is known that he read Voltaires Zadig, ou La
Destinée (Zadig, or the Book of Fate)
François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire
In Votaires work, the hero Zadig uses logical
evaluation of the evidence to identify the kings
dog and the queens horse.
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Poes Influences
Poe also read Vidocqs book of memoirs.
Dupin, Poes detective, acknowledges Vidocq in
The Murders in the Rue Morgue Vidocq, for
example, was a good guesser and a persevering
man. But, without educated thought, he erred
continually by the very intensity of his
investigations. He impaired his vision by
holding the object too close. He might see,
perhaps, one or two points with unusual
clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost
sight of the matter as a whole. There is such a
thing as being too profound.
In The Purloined Letter, Poe also describes
Vidocqs method of searching a house, used by the
character of Monsieur G------, the Prefect of the
Parisian police.
At the time the Dupin stories were published,
Vidocq was under suit by the French police for
making them look bad by his success! The story
was followed in American newspapers and would
have been known to Poe.
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Fun Fact!
About a decade after Poes death, Lincoln who
was a huge fan of the Dupin stories used
similar detective skills to secure an acquittal
for a legal client.
When Lincoln ran for president, his admiration of
Poes detective fiction was a point in his
favor. One of his supporters, the author William
Dean Howells, said in his campaign biography of
Lincoln The bent of his mind is mathematical
and metaphysical, and he is therefore pleased
with the absolute and logical method of Poes
tales and sketches, in which the problem of
mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday
facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is
said that he suffers no year to pass without a
perusal of this author.
Lincoln also wrote The Trailer Murder, a
detective story based on a case from his own
experience as a lawyer.
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Another Fun Fact!
Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinean writer, was
also a super huge fan of Poe. He believed that
the ghost of Poe dictated detective stories to
him. As further homage, he also consciously
imitated Poes writing style.
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Publishing history

• 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue published
  in Grahams Magazine

• 1842, The Mystery of Marie Roget A Sequel to
  The Murders in the Rue Morgue, also published in
  Grahams

• 1844, The Purloined Letter, published in The
  Gift 1845

• All three stories, among others, were published
  by Wiley Putnam in 1846

• Poe did not think much of his own detective
  stories These tales of ratiocination owe most
  of their popularity to being something in a new
  key. I do not mean to say they are not ingenious
  but people think them more ingenious than they
  are on account of their method and air of
  method (1846)

First page of Poes manuscript of The Murders in
the Rue Morgue

• Poe did, however, trade on their popularity to
  persuade publishers to take his later works.

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Poes Recipe for a Detective Story
The thesis of the novel may be regarded as
based upon curiosity. Every point is so arranged
as to perplex the reader, and whet his desire for
elucidation There can be no question that, by
such means as these, many points which would
have been comparatively insipid if given in full
detail in a natural sequence, are endued with the
interest of mystery.
The design of mystery, however, being once
determined by an author, it becomes imperative,
first, that no undue or inartistical means be
employed to conceal the secret of the plot and
secondly, that the secret be well kept
A failure to preserve it until the proper moment
of dénouement throws all into confusion. If the
mystery leak out, against the authors will, his
purposes are immediately at odds and ends, for he
proceeds upon the supposition that certain
impressions do exist, which do not exist, in the
mind of his readers. (from Poes essay on
Charles Dickens, 1841)
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A New Genre Is Born
Initially, there were no imitators, due to the
conventions of the Victorian novel versus those
of the magazine serial, and because Poes
critical acclaim lay with his poetry and horror
stories.
However, in 1887, the first Sherlock Holmes story
was published. Its author, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, always acknowledged Holmes forerunner
Dupin and the inspiration of Poe.
In 1909, to honor the 100th anniversary of Poes
birth, Doyle gave a speech at the Authors Club
in London It is not, I think, upon his strange
and haunting poems that Poes fame will rest But
his tales were one of the great landmarks and
starting points in the literature of the last
century For those tales have been so pregnant
with suggestion, so stimulating to the minds of
others, that it may be said of many of them that
each is a root from which a whole literature has
developed Where was the detective story until
Poe breathed the breath of life into it?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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The Direct Descendants of Poes C. Auguste Dupin
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock
Holmes Originally published 1887-1927
GK Chesterton and Father Brown Originally
published 1911-1935
Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot Originally
published 1920-1975
Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey Originally
published 1923-1998
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Poe, Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, and Sayers have
all remained continuously in print since their
first appearances. In 1940, nearly 100 years
after Poes death, the Golden Age of mystery
writing began, with Christie and Sayers at the
apex of their careers.
The mystery genre, with its amateur detectives
and the invitation to the reader to solve the
puzzle first, remains one of the most popular
mass-market genres of all time.
Poes poetry and gothic horror stories may be
read today in classrooms across the world, but
his most enduring and wide-reaching literary
legacy is the creation of the modern detective
story.
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Some of My Favorite Authors Who Give Mysterious
Nods to Poe
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THE END
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Works Cited Green, Jim and Jim Finch. Sleuths,
Sidekicks and Stooges An Annotated Bibliography
of Detectives, Their Assistants and Their Rivals
in Crime, Mystery and Adventure Fiction
1795-1995. Aldershot, England Scolar Press,
1997. Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure The
Life and Times of the Detective Story. New York
D. Appleton-Century Co., 1943. Herbert, Rosemary,
ed. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery
Writing. New York Oxford University Press,
1999. Murch, A.E. The Development of the
Detective Novel. Port Washington, NY Kennikat
Press, 1968. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Purloined
Letter. Complete Tales and Poems With
Selections from His Critical Writings. New York
Barnes and Noble Books, 1992. 593-602. Poe,
Edgar Allan. The Purloined Letter. The Gift.
Philadelphia Carey and Hart, 1845.
41-61. Rollyson, Carl, ed. Critical Survey of
Mystery and Detective Fiction Revised Edition.
Vol. 4. Pasadena, CA Salem Press Inc.,
2008. Stein, Aaron Marc. The Mystery Story in
Cultural Perspective. The Mystery Story. Ed.
John Ball. Del Mar, CA Publishers Inc.,
1976. Steinbrummer, Chris and Otto Penzler, eds.
Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York
McGraw-Hill Inc, 1976.
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Works Cited Continued Symons, Julian. Mortal
Consequences A History From the Detective
Story to the Crime Novel. New York Harper and
Row, Publishers, 1972. Thomas, Ronald. Detection
in the Victorian Novel. The Cambridge Companion
to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre David.
Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2001.
169-191. Woeller, Waltraud and Bruce Cassiday.
The Literature of Crime and Detection An
Illustrated History from Antiquity to the
Present. New York The Ungar Publishing Company,
1988. Worthington, Heather. The Rise of the
Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular
Fiction. Basingstoke, England Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005. Wright, Thomas. "Edgar Allan
Poe." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American
Literature. Ed. Jay Parini. Vol. 3. Oxford
Oxford University Press, 2004. 366-375.