Abstract
I have, during the course of this study, argued that the concept of enclosure should be recognized as having a profound effect on detective fiction. Much of the reason for this is directly attributable to the locked room mystery, and in particular to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’; its dual status as the first modern detective story and a locked room mystery has meant that it occupies a seminal position in the canon. In this story, as I have already demonstrated, enclosure was consonant with the architecture of the locked room, the nature of the new narrative structure and the way in which the theme of ratiocination formed a frame around the narrative. Crucially, the theme of logical reasoning interacts with the narrative to fulfil the detective story’s desire for closure.
Now, brought to this conclusion in so unequivocal a manner as we are, it is not our part, as reasoners, to reject it on account of apparent impossibilities. It is only for us to prove that these apparent ‘impossibilities’ are in reality, not such.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’1
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Notes
Conan Doyle, ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, p. 216–17.
Anna Katherine Green, The Leavenworth Case (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878), p. 24.
W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 149, 151.
Anthony Berkeley, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (New York: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1929), p. 159.
Agatha Christie, 4.50 From Paddington (London: Collins, 1957), p. 60.
Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, p. 173.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1907), pp. 114–15.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown), p. 69.
Francis M. Nevins, Jr., ‘Foreword’ to Donald A. Yates, ‘An Essay on Locked Rooms’, in The Mystery Writer’s Art, ed. Francis M. Nevins (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970), p. 272.
Peter Thoms, Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction (Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 1998), p. 3.
Conan Doyle, ‘The Red-Headed League’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (London: John Murray, 1956), p. 43.
Paul Auster, City of Glass, in The New York Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 67.
Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 25.
Agatha Christie, ‘Problem at Sea’ in Poirot’s Early Cases (Glasgow: Fontana, 1987), p. 228.
Stephen Knight, ‘The Golden Age’, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 90.
Josef Škvorecký, ‘Author’s Note’, in The End of Lieutenant Boruvka, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990).
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© 2011 Michael Cook
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Cook, M. (2011). The Narrative of Enclosure. In: Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230313736_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230313736_8
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