Paper

Contents...

   I. Introduction
II. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": The Introduction of C. Auguste Dupin
III. "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter"
IV. Poe and the French
V. The Edgar Awards
VII. Bibliography

Introduction

Few writers can claim to have the amount of influence that Edgar Allan Poe has had over many literary genres. His horror stories, including “The Black Cat,” his poetry, including “The Raven,” and his own literary criticisms are all undeniable classics. None of these genres, however, were as heavily impacted by Poe, as was the mystery genre.

“The history of the detective story begins with the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ a masterpiece of its kind, which even its author was unable to surpass; and Poe, unlike most originators, rang the bell the first time he took aim,” states Brander Matthews (as cited in Cambiaire, 44).

This paper will attempt to reinforce Matthews’s view of Poe as “the father of the detective story” and to stress Poe’s impact on the genre, by examining Poe’s own works and the works of others, specifically Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Baudelaire, as well as examine the opinions of experts regarding this subject.

”The Murders in the Rue Morgue”:
The Introduction of C. Auguste Dupin

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is widely regarded as the first detective story. The original title was “Murders in the Rue Trianon” but Poe wanted the title to deal more directly with death (Sova, 162). The story was a sensation in its time. The plot was so unique, so strange, that many critics did not know how to react. They called it “stupefying (Daniel, 107),” and “twisted (Daniel, 107).” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is considered one of the best mystery stories of all time; Forbes proclaimed it the very best in the top ten list of the best mystery stories of all time (Friedman, 142).

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” introduced the world to a new genre: the detective story. This genre is different from mystery in that it emphasizes the “detector” as well as the crime. It also stresses analysis instead of trial and error. The genre of analytic detective fiction, as in the Dupin stories, is very suited for playing out tension. As John Irwin explains (according to Edgardo Krebs), Poe's detective stories are circular and endless because they are created less to solve a mystery than to prompt "analyzing the act of analysis," an idea in which "self-conscious thought turns back upon itself to find out it cannot absolutely coincide with itself." Later on in his book The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, John Irwin, according to Edgardo Krebs, credits Jorge Luis Borges with initiating this particular interpretation of Poe, in three short stories of his own, published almost exactly one hundred years after the Dupin trilogy. Borges modeled “The Garden of Forking Paths” after “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Death and the Compass” after “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “Ibn Hakkan alBokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth” after “The Purloined Letter.” Irwin claims that Borges’s stories are not only tributes to Poe’s, but they are also reversals of them.   Krebs states that “the outcome of Poe's analytical fictions is the victory of mind,” but, in Borges’s, the focus is on the more “sinister” elements. At the end of Borges’s stories, the villain, not the hero, is the victor (Krebs, 467).

Another writer influenced by “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is horror author, screenwriter, and director Clive Barker. Barker, himself described as having “a genius for dark invention that rivals Poe and Sade (Barker, ix)” and called “the future of horror” by Stephen King (Barker, ix), describes his story “New Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in the introduction the 1998 edition of his Books of Blood, as “My homage to the greatest mystery/horror writer in the world, Edgar Allan Poe (Barker, xii).” “New Murders in the Rue Morgue” is told through the point of view of Lewis, a restless old man who goes in search of the real Rue Morgue, whose story was apparently told to Poe by Lewis’s grandfather.   In this fictional story, Barker’s homage to Poe’s “immortal story (Barker, 297),” all the characters from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” are based on real people, including C. Auguste Dupin, Poe’s “perfect detective (Barker, 297)” and “peculiar genius (Barker, 297),” who, in Barker’s story, is based on the character Lewis’s uncle.

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was the introduction of the aforementioned C. Auguste Dupin, one of Poe’s most famous characters. Dupin uses his superior intellect to identify with the criminal mind and to help the police in solving crimes. His personality, use of clues, and his ability to use logic to expose criminals are traits that later incorporated into the characters of other writers, especially Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who stated:
“Edgar Allan Poe, who in his carelessly prodigal fashion threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own. …On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the footmarks of Poe always in front of him. He is happy if he ever finds the means of breaking away and striking on some little side-track of his own (Cambiaire, 45).”
Doyle even used Poe’s technique of telling the detective’s stories through the point of view of a less-talented, sometimes “bumbling (Sova, 74)” companion. Doyle also gave his Sherlock Holmes attributes similar to those of Dupin, including his intellectual capabilities and bizarre habits.

Many critics (Stuprich, 85) have also suggested that Agatha Christie may have had Poe’s Dupin in mind when she created her legendary detective Hercule Poirot, who maintains that his powers of deduction reside in his use of “the little gray cells (Stuprich, 85)” and whose idiosyncrasies abound.

Despite the Dupin character’s strange and solitary personality, his intellect allows him to understand the mundane and the practical to solve cases that astound everyone else, including the police assigned to the cases. His sharpest mental weapon is “ratiocination,” a higher form of deduction that allows Dupin to detect what other people have overlooked or dismissed as not important (Sova, 74). In the modern detective story, the most important character is almost always the “intellectual sleuth (Cambiaire, 45)” who always finds the criminal or solves the mystery. Poe invented the idea of an acute observer whose painstaking analysis of human nature accurately follows the workings of the human mind (Cambiaire, 45).

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a perfect example of this painstaking analysis. In the story, Dupin discovers that an orangutan is murdering women. The process of Dupin’s reasoning is unique and remarkable. The police arrest Le Bon, an innocent bank clerk, as a suspect. Witnesses testify that someone, presumably the victim, spoke French but the murderer spoke “a foreign language (Poe, “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 190),” but no one can agree what language was spoken. The lack of agreement about the language spoken eventually leads Dupin to conclude that a human did not speak the language. While investigating the crime scene he discovers several clues the police have overlooked, including a distinctly non-human hair. Dupin places an ad in the newspaper hoping to somehow elicit a response from or about the possible non-human killer. A sailor answers the ad, and it is found that an orangutan, brought from Borneo on a ship, committed the crimes (Poe, “Murders”, 176-218).

“The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter”

“The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter” were the final two stories of the Dupin trilogy. They continued to revolutionize and influence the mystery genre, especially “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which can actually be considered a “true crime” story as well as a mystery story.

“The Mystery of Marie Roget” was the first sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” This somewhat lengthy short story was based on the actual unsolved murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, an American. It was the first detective story to attempt to solve an actual crime (Sova, 164). Though based on true events, Poe transferred the American murder to Paris and gave the characters French names; for example, “Mary Rogers” became “Marie Roget.” He also changed certain details to fit a more French perspective than American. However, one major similarity between the actual case and Poe’s story was the role of the media: the fictional Paris newspapers sensationalized the case every bit as much as the real New York papers did (Walsh, 95), and both created their own inventive details and solutions. C. Auguste Dupin observes, “We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation—to make a point—than to further the cause of truth (Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” 270),” a statement that many would say still rings true to the present day.

“The Purloined Letter” was, in Poe’s own words, “…perhaps the best of my tales of ratiocination (Sova, 204).” In this tale Dupin once again uses his intellect to enter the mind of the criminal to determine where a letter was hidden. He once again outthinks the police assigned to the case and the unnamed “prefect” narrator, who was the narrator in all of the Dupin stories, and can only be compared to Doyle’s Dr. Watson, a sidekick to Dupin as Watson was to Sherlock Holmes. This story was Poe’s way of confirming the details of the mystery genre.

Poe and the French

Dupin’s unique powers of detection, his many idiosyncrasies, and the dual association of a French detective created by an American writer, led to many successors in the genre, in the United States and abroad. In addition to Clive Barker, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, both Englishmen, Poe also heavily influenced the French. Alexandre Dumas’s M. Jackal in Les Mohicans de Paris, Victor Hugo’s Javert (and, ultimately, Les Miserables), and Eugene Sue’s Les Mysteres de Paris have all been said to be heavily influenced by Poe’s Dupin (Cambiaire, 47). In addition, five books of the twelve-volume set of Charles Baudelaire’s standard works (Sova, 23) are translations of Poe’s works. Baudelaire, though not a mystery writer, was heavily influenced by Poe’s writing and is responsible for establishing Poe’s reputation in France. He paraphrases or exaggerates upon Poe’s themes in a number of his works and considered Poe “the most powerful pen of our age (Sova, 24).”

In turn, Poe was somewhat influenced by the French writers Vidocq and Voltaire. It is known that Poe read Vidocq because he criticized Vidocq’s Memoires, saying that Vidocq was “a good guesser (Cambiaire, 47)” and “too profound (Cambiaire, 47)” in his characters’ deductions. Voltaire, however, is described as Poe’s “predecessor (Cambiaire, 47)” in the mystery genre. It has been said (Cambiaire, 48) that in Voltaire’s Zadig is found the method in which Poe applied more elaborately than Voltaire; that is, Zadig was a district attorney and Cyrano de Bergerac was his pupil (Cambiaire, 48).

Whether Poe was influenced by Voltaire or not, it is evident through Baudelaire’s translations that his Tales of Ratiocination became known to the French. They found a well-prepared ground, as they were striving for an end that many French writers had been trying to attain, and creating a new genre that had already been established, but not perfected, and which the reading public was ready to accept with eagerness and pleasure (Cambiaire, 49).

The Edgar Awards

In addition to all the other praise that “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Poe’s other mystery stories brought him, Poe is so much revered in the mystery/detective genre that the Mystery Writers of America created an award in his honor.    Founded in 1945, the Mystery Writers of America is the American organization of mystery writers. Each year in April, the MWA bestows the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Awards for achievement in various categories.
The Mystery Writers of America presented its first Edgar Allan Poe Awards in 1946 for works published or produced in 1945. Various categories have been added or discontinued over the years. The 2001 Edgar winner for Best Novel was The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale. The 2002 Edgar awards will be presented on May 2, 2002 (http://www.hycyber.com/MYST/edgars.html).

Conclusion

Edgar Allan Poe was a literary force to be reckoned with. Not only did he create many of the most memorable, disturbing tales of horror ever written, thereby paving the way for Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and virtually every horror writer who has ever lived, he also invented the detective story. His “tales of ratiocination” created a unique genre emphasizing detection rather than the crimes committed.

Poe, an American, became an important influence on 19th Century French writers including Baudelaire and Hugo, as well as on 20th Century authors including Clive Barker. Poe’s influence is felt throughout the mystery, horror, and science fiction genres. Few other writers throughout history can make such a claim.

Through examples from Poe’s stories, expert opinions, and examples from other literary figures, it is obvious how much Poe has impacted the mystery genre. Without Poe, mystery as it is now known would not exist.