The Birth of a Detective: Edgar Allan Poe's Immortalisation

Abstract

A big allure of fiction for the readers has been the constant suspense and the question of “And then what happened?” This question, which makes the reader turn page after page, forgetting the clock and sometimes even hunger or thirst, achieves an exceptional height when one turns to the crime fiction or mystery genre: the pursuit of that which is not known, the attempt to deduce it out of the given information, and the denouement that ties it all together—all of these elements create a form of fiction that has entranced generations for centuries, if not millennia. The characters found in these fictions have entered the collective consciousness as more than real. But where did these characters and tropes first originate? This paper aims to explore three detective works by Edgar Allan Poe— ”Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter.” These are stories with Victorian gothic settings that pre-date the emergence of crime fiction as a separate genre, before the term “detective” was invented, and attempts to find whether Poe indeed was the first author to create a character that follows the traits of the modern detectives such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. By way of this analysis, the paper gives an insight into what constitutes a modern detective characterisation, along with examining the tropes and themes related to the crime fiction and mystery genre.