Edgar Allan Poe's detective fiction
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"We existed within ourselves alone."
Edgar Allan Poe, from 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'
Whilst in absolute terms, the origins of crime fiction cannot be decisively attributed to to an individual author, the currently accepted academic wisdom tends to credit Edgar Allan Poe as the man who defined the role of the literary detective when he created the character C. Auguste Dupin. He appears in only three outings, those being 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' 'The Mystery of Marie Roget,' and 'The Purloined Letter,' which, when taken as a whole, have dictated the course of the genre over the last one hundred and fifty years, and indeed continue to do so; every writer working in the crime fiction tradition owes a debt of gratitude to these tales. At its most basic level, "the detective story is the very paradigm of a 'rattling good story'; the reader cannot put the book down (as the saying goes) because of the sheer compulsion to find the explanation of 'whodunnit',"1 and it was Poe who established this paradigm, whilst also positioning crime fiction as "the literary form that most effectively includes both the quest for meaning and the final deciphering of uncovered symbols,"2 a crucial observation when you consider how 'quest for meaning' literature flourished during a twentieth century that was obsessed with "meaning" as an absolute concept, an obsession that embodied itself in a critical infatuation with the notion of symbols and signifiers.
David Lehman expanded upon this idea when writing that "the prophetic Poe, collaborating with his zeitgeist, arrived at the distinctive signs and symbols of a universal nightmare - and devised in the form of the detective story a means of keeping the nightmare at bay."3 In doing so, Poe's Dupin offers the reader reassurance; he represents "the search for rationality and order in a world disrupted by criminal violence,"4 and we recognise that his intellect is so obviously infallible that, though we only encounter him in three stories, we are left with the belief that no case is unsolvable as long as it is conferred to him. He routinely "explains the inexplicable, thereby demonstrating the ultimate comprehensibility of the world beyond the self,"5 and in doing so he acts as a comforting vision of a world in which crime can never prosper.
To briefly play devil's advocate, John T. Irwin undeniably had a point when he commented that "as a character, Dupin is as thin as the paper he's printed on. As for his adventures, they amount to little more than reading newspaper accounts of the crime and talking with the Prefect of police and the narrator in the privacy of his apartment."6 From a critical perspective, they are somewhat lacking, largely devoid of the tension and drama you would expect, instead spending far too much time fawning over Dupin's methodology. So much so, in fact, that Arthur Conan Doyle felt compelled to pass comment in the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, having Holmes remark that "Dupin was a very inferior fellow...he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."7 That said, you simply cannot deny the impact the character had upon literary history. Within these three tales, Poe unknowingly crafted what was to become the model for the entire genre, as the writers who followed in his wake - Conan Doyle included - 'borrowed' his ideas so liberally that many of them would become the signifiers of crime fiction. Dupin was "perhaps not the very first detective in fiction, but undoubtedly the model for a great many later sleuths, investigators and private eyes."8
His exploits are imparted to us by a nameless narrator, who is both the chronicler of Dupin, and a loyal, trusted companion, one who remains unable to perceive that which, to the great detective, is both obvious and integral to the case. Dupin, meanwhile, is a man of the kind of analytical genius and cold logic that makes him appear somewhat detached from reality; though only an amateur sleuth, he possesses a singular brilliance that puts the combined efforts of the Parisian police force to shame. His method requires him to balance "imaginative involvement with analytical detachment...[and] involves both a meticulous examination of physical evidence (involvement in the world of men) and a dispassionate consideration of the case as a whole (withdrawal to the realm of abstract thought)."9 If the narrator acts as our gateway into the mind of Dupin, then Dupin himself is intended to be the man whom the reader both roots for and relates to. It is Lehman's opinion that "the ambiguous person of the detective is interposed between the criminal and the police, those old antagonists, and suddenly there appears to be a detached, independent point of view with which we can identify ourselves."10
That said, how much Dupin truly conforms to this ideal is open to question. He can hardly be put forward as an easily relatable character; he is, after all, essentially an unknowable figure, and his eccentricities render him even more elusive, even though they are representative of the unique gifts for which we are expected to celebrate him. Instead, these qualities invite a certain amount of sympathy. As Margaret Kinsman wrote, "the prototypically eccentric, peculiar, intellectually superior and egotistical detective has long been associated, by readers and commentators, with a deep inner loneliness."11 As the narrator of the Dupin tales observes in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' "it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris."12 Such a remark is telling; until he encountered the narrator and the two became associates (and, ultimately, friends), we are left to assume that Dupin lived an entirely solitary existence, almost completely cut off from the human society he fights so stridently to protect.
...to be continued.
Footnotes
1. Martin Swales, 'Introduction ,' from The Art of Detective Fiction, edited by Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales and Robert Vilian (Basingstoke: New York: Macmillan; St. Martin's Press, 2000), page xii
2. Maurice J. Bennett, 'The Detective Fiction of Poe and Borges,' from Comparative Literature, Volume 35, Number 3 (Summer, 1983), page 267
3. David Lehman, The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (Ann Arboer: University of Michigan Press, 2000), page 72
4. David Schmid, 'The Locus of Disruption: Serial Murder and Generic Conventions in Detective Fiction,' from The Art of Detective Fiction, page 76
5. J. Gerald Kennedy, 'The Limits of Reason: Poe's Deluded Detectives,' from American Literature, Volume 47, Number 2 (May, 1975), page 185
6. John T. Irwin, 'Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, from Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), page 28
7. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, collected in Sherlock Holmes: The Original Illustrated 'Strand' (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2006), page 24
8. Brian Docherty, 'Introduction: Hard Talk and Mean Streets,' from American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 1-3
9. Kennedy, 'The Limits of Reason: Poe's Deluded Detectives,' pp. 194-195
10. Lehman, The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection, page 142
11. Margaret Kinsman, 'A Band of Sisters,' from The Art of Detective Fiction, page 158
12. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' from Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Everyman's Library, 2002), page 415
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