Poe: Part 2

There is so much material on Poe elsewhere online and I don't propose to add much here. I did, however, want to summarize some of Poe's contributions to the detective genre which prefigured much of this category thereafter.

THE PURLOINED LETTER

In case you forgot the story: an unscrupulous and powerful politician, Minister D, has by trick gained possession of a compromising letter and is blackmailing the owner, a charming member of the royal family, who has brought her problem to the police. Their search is fruitless, and Dupin is unhelpful to Prefect G. A month later, the Prefect is more depressed than ever, and Dupin asks if he'd truly pay 50,000 francs to anyone who could get the letter. G says yes; Dupin asks for the check, and hands him the letter! The Prefect, overcome with joy, departs. The rest of the story is Dupin's explanation to his companion. The letter had been left in full view in a letter rack, turned inside out and torn, as though of no importance. The obvious was overlooked, a truism often employed in later detective fiction.

Dupin is no longer an abstract logician. He is more rounded. He is capable of humor. No longer the odd recluse of the Rue Morgue, he now has the stature to know Minister D, and is rich enough to own a gold snuff box and fill it. This is all adding to Dupin's development as a character. But this is the last Dupin story from Poe.

THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET

This was the real 'sequel' to 'Rue Morgue' and far less successful. The outstanding feature of this tale is that it was based on a real crime, the 1841 killing of Mary Rogers, a popular and pretty cigar girl in New York, who disappeared only to return a few days later after a secret elopement with a naval officer. But three years later, she disappeared again, and her body was found in the Hudson. The sensational story lingered in the newspapers for a long time, until a few months later her lover was found dead with a sad note and a bottle of poison by his side, an apparent suicide.

Poe transfers the details to Paris. Thus, Dupin and his narrating sidekick take interest in the murder of a perfume shop clerk, Marie Roget, whose body is found in the Seine. The newspapers are full of juicy details and speculation; Dupin says the papers want to "create a sensation instead of furthering the cause of truth." Even so, he uses the newspaper reports alone to solve the crime from his armchair in a very long and, frankly, tedious narrative where he employs his 'calculus of probabilities'.

Dupin takes pains to disprove the common theory that a gang did it, deciding that a single person involved with Roget in a forbidden romance did it, probably an upper-rank sailor of color with knowledge of ropes and boats -- a boat with a particular feature, which, when found, would find the killer. The narrator abruptly says that this is what happened.

Critics say it's more of an essay than a story. One might say it's all telling, with no showing. But in Dupin's long monologue, we get a summarized view of the details of much future detective fiction. We have the confirmation of the body's ID in the morgue based on clothing and the forensics of 'floaters', the establishment of a timeline (based partly on witnesses and partly on the science of bodily decomposition in water), the testing of theories and disposal of illogical ones, retracing the movements of the victim, the interpretation of clues, and the reconstruction of the crime. Still, while short, it's a laborious read.

THE GOLD BUG

The year before he wrote "Rue Morgue," Poe had a contest in a New York newspaper, "Alexander's Messenger," promising to decipher any code readers could invent. Four months after "Rue Morgue" was published, Poe wrote an article on codes and ciphers for "Graham's Magazine." This story reveals his interest in deductive reasoning, or 'ratiocination,' as he called it, and recalls a time in 1829 when Poe served in the army at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island off the South Carolina coast. Again, the hero is French. LeGrand is like Dupin: from a noble family, but poor and a recluse. In the story, Poe continues some features of detective stories: detection based on observation and the use of analysis, a puzzling title (the bug is incidental), an assistant kept in the dark until the end, an admiring narrator.

IN CLOSING...

Not only did Poe establish the basic rules for the detective story, he also set patterns for the different types of detective stories we have today: "Rue Morgue" is a sensational crime story with a brilliant and quirky amateur who out-thinks the cops. "Marie Roget" is an armchair-detective story and based on a true crime, a 'ripped-from-the-headlines' story. "Letter" is a kind of secret agent story, with a theft in diplomatic circles, a missing document, a blackmail, a beautiful woman in trouble, and police trying to avoid a politically dangerous scandal. "Gold Bug" is the prototype cryptogram story.

Poe once acted a a detective himself -- sort of -- when he wrote an essay on Charles Dickens. In it, he revealed that from the first 2 installments of "Barnaby Rudge" he had accurately deduced the rest of the plot. When Dickens saw this, he said, "He must be the very devil!"

Poe's horror stories, with their portrayal of psychological states of mind, contrast strongly with the logic and rationality of his detective tales. The first Dupin story, really, is a long illustration of Poe's principles of ratiocination (analytical reasoning), which serves as a prologue to the story (a part which many editors cut off). Critic Joesph Wood Crutch once said, "Poe invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad."

Do you agree?