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Poe and Detective Fiction
Edgar Allan Poe's Influence on Detective Fiction
While many people do not relate Edgar Allan Poe with detective fiction and is best known for his tales of the grotesque and macabre, Poe is in fact the father of modern detective fiction. Through his mystery stories, which include "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter," Poe was able to establish a framework of detective motifs that would help to define the genre and would later be applied to other works of detective fiction. Through his three detective stories, which are part of a series that feature C. Auguste Dupin as the eccentric and genius detective, Poe defined five different elements that should be present in order to construct a successful mystery story.
In order for any detective story to be successful, Poe contended that a crime had to occur. In each of Poe's stories, there is a unique crime that is perpetrated. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget," the sequel to the first story, the crime that is committed is murder, while in the third story, "The Purloined Letter," the crime is theft. It is only logical that in order for any story to be considered a mystery or detective story, then some sort of crime must occur; without an element of crime, then a story cannot be considered to be detective fiction.
The second element that must be present is that the detective fiction's storyline must make use of a detective or sleuth that has a higher degree of inductive...
Poe states that the analytical man "derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, or hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural" (Poe 141). In this regard, Poe has defined what characteristics must be present within a detective in order to be successful. It is also this type of detective that was adopted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he created the character of Sherlock Holmes. Like Dupin, Holmes exhibits superior intelligence and is well versed in a variety of subjects ("The Wide World of Sherlock Holmes").
Thirdly, it must be demonstrated that the police are incapable of solving the crime that has been perpetrated. It is the police's inability to solve a crime that allows the detective, who is usually an outsider, to provide a new perspective to the crime that has been committed. An outsider's view also helps to provide police, and the reader, with new information. Sherlock Holmes understood how he contributed to ongoing police investigations, once informing Watson, "You see, but you do not observe" (Doyle). It is these types of observations that give the detective a leg up on the police who, like Watson in Doyle's tales, only see the big picture and overlook the details.
According to Poe, the fourth element to detective fiction is a story's solution to the crime. While the clues as to who and how a crime was committed are usually interspersed within…
Works Cited
Doyle, Sir Francis Conan. "A Scandal In Bohemia." Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Web. Accessed 28 March 2012.
Mansfield-Kelly, Deane and Lois A. Marchino. The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction.
San Francisco: Pearson Longman, 2005. Print.
"Poe and Detective Fiction." National Endowment for the Arts. Web. Accessed 28 March 2012.
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