Edgar Allan Poe and the Detective Story Narrative

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 Roget’ (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.