Abstract
One of the more remarkable facts about detective fiction, a genre which has now assumed epic proportions, is its foundation of just three short stories, an experiment to be abandoned by its creator almost as quickly as it appeared. For Edgar Allan Poe, the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841, followed by ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842–3) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), was to represent the extent of his output in this field. Although he always seemed diffident about his foray into detective fiction, being ‘conscious of the inherent gimmickry’ of the tales, he nevertheless realized that he was in uncharted literary territory.3 In a letter to a friend, he wrote, ‘these tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key’.4 This ‘new key’ was characterized by the representation of crime as an intellectual puzzle, invoking the practice of scientism in clue solving and heralding the detective as a major literary figure. So complete was Poe’s innovation that the narrative structure he composed for these tales was to become a blueprint for all subsequent detective stories. Thus the locked room of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, as a prototype for detective fiction with its accent on enclosures, death and references to sequestered lives, not only became a paradigm for the way in which the genre would function structurally, but carried with it an idea central to Poe’s Gothic texts.
The problem that makes the purest appeal to logic for its solution. It highlights the ‘closed’ nature of the detective tale and is, unquestionably, its most traditional expression. I am speaking of what has come to be referred to as ‘the locked room mystery’.
Donald A. Yates, ‘An Essay on Locked Rooms’1
Pure reason, incapable of any limitation, is the deity itself. Hegel,
‘The Life of Jesus’2
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Notes
Donald A. Yates, ‘An Essay on Locked Rooms’, in The Mystery Writer’s Art, ed. Francis M. Nevins, Jr. (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970), p. 273.
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘The Life of Jesus’, Three Essays, 1793–1795: The Tubingen Essay, Berne Fragments, The Life of Jesus, ed. and trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 75.
J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 119.
The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), p. 328.
Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 24–5.
François Eugène Vidocq, Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime, ed. and trans. Edwin Gile Rich (Edinburgh: AK Press/Nabat, 2003).
Sita A. Schütt, ‘French Crime Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003), pp. 60–1.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in Tales, Poems and Essays (London: Collins, 1952), p. 341.
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 43.
Ostrom, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, p. 328.
Heta Pyrrhönen, Murder from an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), p. 16.
Patrick Diskin, ‘Poe, Le Fanu and the Sealed Room Mystery’, Notes and Queries 13 (September 1966), 337–9. The tale referred to by Diskin is J. C. Managan, ‘The Thirty Flasks’, Dublin University Magazine xii (October 1838), 408–24.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Cardboard Box’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (London: John Murray, 1956), pp. 923–6.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories (London: John Murray, 1954), pp. 275–82.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’, in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories, ed. Douglas G. Greene and Robert C. S. Adey (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994), p. 33.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 20.
Mark S. Madoff, ‘Inside, Outside, and the Gothic Locked-Room Mystery’, in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS, 1989), p. 50.
Sidney Poger and Tony Magistrale, ‘Poe’s Children: The Conjunction of the Detective and the Gothic Tale’, Clues 18.1 (1997), 141–2.
Geoffrey Hartmann, ‘Literature High and Low: The Case of the Mystery Story’, in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 217.
Joseph N. Riddel, ‘The “Crypt” of Edgar Poe’, Boundary 2 7.3 (Spring 1979), 123.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Instinct vs. Reason — A Black Cat’, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. II, p. 682.
J. A. Leo Lemay, ‘The Psychology of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’, American Literature 54 (1982), 166.
Jeanne M. Malloy, ‘Apocalyptic Imagery and the Fragmentation of the Psyche: “The Pit and the Pendulum”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 46.1 (June 1991), 94.
William W. Stowe, ‘Reason and Logic in Detective Fiction’, Semiotics 6,2.3 (1987), 374–5.
Kevin J. Hayes, ‘One-Man Modernist’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 232.
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© 2011 Michael Cook
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Cook, M. (2011). Edgar Allan Poe and the Detective Story Narrative. In: Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230313736_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230313736_1
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