The dangerously curious, however, should feel free to click HERE for a sneak preview of the kinds of questions we might ask. Don't be sorry, because it will be too late.
Now down to the brass tacks.
END OF POSSIBLY MEANINGLESS FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. POE.
For a narrative of such facts that believes in itself more than this one does, click HERE.
The word "detective" did not yet exist in English in 1841, and so Poe, of course, does not refer either to Dupin as a "detective," nor to these stories as "detective tales." Scotland Yard had not yet been established, nor were there detective agencies in the United States.
One of Poe's strongest and most direct "inspirations," was the memoirs Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857). He was a convicted thief and career criminal who turned police spy in prison so skillfully that the prison official and police department forged documents and otherwise altered records in order to obtain Vidocq's release.
After release from jail, he became chief of the Sûreté in 1811. He hired and trained other ex-convicts, forming a network of undercover agents. (four at first, eventually 28). Both Vidocq and his agents were not paid a salary for their investigations, but paid bounties for every solution and arrest they made. This crew was constantly suspected of committing many of the crimes they "solved." And finally, in 1827, the suspicions were strong enough that Vidocq had to resign. He return as chief in 1832, but resigned after a month, and then spent his time writing his memoires and fiction, and doing private detective work. His private group, the Reseignements, was the first private detective agency. The ambivalent boundaries between criminal and detective, and the irrational and the rational returns in the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler among others. The figure must have intrigued Poe for its ambiguities for aesthetic/philosophical reasons as well as more personal, psychological reasons.
April 1841 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Graham's Magazine
This is one of the first, "locked room mysteries" - a kind of puzzle-story that involves a murder in a room locked from the inside, with either no windows or windows also securely locked from more personal and the inside. The brutal murder of an elderly woman and her daughter is the occasion for the "detective" debut of C. Auguste Dupin, who deduces that the crimes were committed by an oranguatang brought to Paris by a sailor..
Nov, Dec 1842, Feb 1843 "The Mystery of Marie Roget, " (serialized in The Ladies' Companion).
This case, the murder of a French shopclerk, is based on a real murder case, that of Mary Cecelia Rogers in 1841 (in NYC). Poe studied that case through the newspapers, and then transposed the story into the fictional French setting, but claims that the deliberate acts of reasoning Dupin performs to solve the murder in the story, can be applied to the real life case, and solve that as well!
Nov 1844. "The Purloined Letter. " The Gift.
Here Dupin helps to retrieve a letter for the Queen (of France?) from an unscrupulous minister who stole it in front of the Queen, knowing that she did not dare let the King see it. This story has an enormous following and very famous and daunting critical literature/debate surrounding it, from, in the 1920's, Marie Bonaparte's pioneering attempt at a serious Freudian reading, through the 1950s, with Jacques Lacan's attention to the story in his 1954-55 seminar on The Ego in Freud's Technique of Psychoanalysis; and later, in the 1970s, Jacques Derrida's "deconstructive" rereading of the story and Lacan's reading, and Lacan's rejection of such rereadings. And, of course the many commentaries, explications, expansions, and interventions into the stakes in this debate by critics such as Barbara Johnson, Shoshona Feldman, Paul de Man etc. Fortunately, we aren't reading this story this quarter.
The first thousand or so words of "The Murders on the Rue Morgue" are devoted to an introductory essay on analysis. Some sort of introductory material preceding what can properly be called the start of a story was a common apparatus for 19th century authors; but Poe's stories . . . either start at once or begin after no more than a paragraph or two of introduction. This preliminary essay, then, is unusual for Poe. . . . Having read it with care, I can assure you that today's reader does not need it at all. There is nothing in it that is not accomplished better in the course of the story, once the story starts.
Having read it with care, I can assure you that today's reader needs it more than she or he needs the rest of the story. In fact the rest of the story seems like an excuse to write the introduction. Let's actually look at that text.Click here to go there.
To consider what Poe's legacy means to the development of the myth of the detective, click HERE.
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