Capitalising on Poe’s Detective: the Dollars and Sense of Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction

Abstract

The classic detective story seems purposely to have been created in order to avoid the demands of social realism. In becoming ‘simply’ escapist literature such detective tales consciously created their own social milieu, half fabulous, half mythical — a milieu so powerful that later generations would comprehend the era in which these tales were written through the medium of the tales themselves. In so doing later generations of readers would understand the world of Dupin, Holmes, and so on, to be an actual reflection (a conscious mirroring) of social forces at work and at conflict in that period. As such, these tales would have replaced the ‘real’ world with themselves, interposing themselves within that displacement and creating a new perspective. By interposing between contemporary historical forces and the reader this fiction denies its origins and replaces those origins with an enclosed and organised ‘world’. This fictional world is a substitute for and not a mirror to social forces, but in its escapist avoidance of historical and social demands detective fiction can clearly be seen to incorporate those very demands it attempts to elide. An escapist and totally fictional landscape denies the ‘facts’ of its origin.