Complex Numbers

Poe Lease

I can't resist a piece on Poe any more than my housemate's kitten, Edgar Allan Purr, can resist a dangling string.

    When Poe Invented the Detective Story, he Changed the Literary World Forever  

The cat's name was my idea, incidentally.

I don't know much about this source, Crimereads, by the way. I just found this article while searching for something else, and, well, like I said, dangling string.

Even though literature had, for centuries, brimmed with clever problem-solvers, from tricksters to reformed thieves to wise men to police prefects, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” still awed the literary world when it appeared in 1841.

Detective stories were, for Kid Me, kind of like crossword puzzles: fun to complete, but the secrets of their creation might as well have been quantum physics for all I understood them. I would read a science fiction or fantasy book and go, "Hey, I bet I could write like that." Not so with the detective genre.

The police are stumped. But C. Auguste Dupin, a chevalier and rare book aficionado, solves the mystery at home after reading the details in the paper, becoming literature’s first bona fide detective character and starting a genre revolution.

Astute readers will note that thus, science fiction predated detective fiction as a genre.

As literary critic A. E. Murch writes, the detective story is one in which the “primary interest lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events.” Critic Peter Thoms elaborates on this, defining the detective story as “chronicling a search for explanation and solution,” adding, “such fiction typically unfolds as a kind of puzzle or game, a place of play and pleasure for both detective and reader.”

Like I said. Crossword puzzle.

The well-heeled Dupin is an armchair detective who solves puzzles because he can, using a process called “ratiocination,” in which he basically ‘thinks outside of the box.’

I've known several people who prided themselves on "thinking outside of the box." Without exception, all of these people were lousy at thinking in the first place, and just did free-association. This is quite a different procedure than "ratiocination."

(And it’s a good thing he does, or no one will solve these crimes; the murderer of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” turns out to be an escaped orangutan. It might be safe to say no one else would conclude that.)

Goddammit! SPOILERS!

If Poe had not solidified the conventions that we recognize as marking the modern detective story, others likely would have done the same not long after.

Okay, but this is true about pretty much any invention or discovery. If Einstein hadn't worked out relativity, someone else would have. If Nikola Tesla hadn't invented the alternating current method of electricity transmission, others would have. That in no way diminishes Poe's legacy.

And no nineteenth-century detective lineage would be complete without Eugène-François Vidocq, a criminal-turned-criminologist who lived from 1775-1857 and who founded and ran France’s first national police, the Sûreté nationale, as well as France’s first private detection agency. His life inspired countless (swashbuckling) adaptations, including an American adaptation published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1828, entitled “Unpublished passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police,” which Poe very well might have read. Interestingly there’s a character in that story named “Dupin.” Ahem.

"Good writers borrow. Great writers steal." -T.S. Eliot, and everyone who ever quoted him.

Dupin’s ability to read extraordinary meaning into clues makes him rather the first semiotician, elucidating the relationship between signs, signifiers, and ‘signifieds’ more than a century before Ferdinand de Saussure published his work on the subject in 1966—particularly because Dupin finds his clues through linguistics rather than physical objects.

Thus, Poe also invented postmodernism. Before modernism was even a thing.

Years later, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed… Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”

He stole.

Indeed, Doyle construed his detective Sherlock Holmes as an intellectual descendant of Holmes, having Watson (who also participates in a lineage offered by the Dupin stories, but of Dupin’s supportive narrator/chronicler and friend) cite Dupin upon first witnessing Holmes’s deductive genius.

Clearly, that second Holmes should have been "Dupin." Everyone makes mistakes. Even fictional detectives, from time to time, when the plot requires it.

As the article notes at the end, Holmes wouldn't have existed, at least not as we know the character, without Dupin.

Neither would Batman.