Edgar Allan Poe and His Influence on the Detective Genre

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 and deductive reasoning. 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 the narrative, the detective will explain how he, or she, was able to resolve the enigma. Once again, Sherlock Holmes's quip of seeing, but not observing comes into play. Like Dupin, Holmes is able to explain what clues led him to unravel the mystery of the story, which allows readers to understand why the author chose to reveal certain details even though they may have seemed irrelevant at the time (Wilson 216).

The fifth and final element that Poe defined for detective fiction closely ties in with the fourth element. While the detective gathers the clues as the story progresses and is able to induce or deduce information, the reader is given the same opportunity as the fifth element of detective fiction dictates that the author must give the reader a fair chance of solving the mystery on their own. This means that no clues or information are withheld from the reader and that they have the same information that the detective gathers during the course of the investigation.