Edgar Allan Poe and The Creation of Genre Fiction
The Detective Novel, The Haunted House Story, and The Psychological Thriller All Trace Their Roots to One American Writer
In Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, the title character has a mystery to solve, namely, the mystery of his origin. He questions various witnesses, and, gradually, the truth about events from the past unfold.
And thus was mystery fiction born.
We can find examples of mysteries in early Arabian and Chinese fiction as well, and no doubt there are many mystery stories that have been lost to history.
As far as modern fiction goes, we get closer to the mystery genre when Voltaire writes Zadig, with a central character who uses the methods of the detective to solve mysteries and enigmas that appear throughout the story.
The groundwork was in place for Edgar Allan Poe in 1841. In a letter to a friend about the piece he was working on at that time, Poe said, “its theme is the exercise of ingenuity in detecting a murderer.”
Poe would later call this work a story of “ratiocination,” a noun that fell out of use in the 20th century but can still be found in dictionaries with the definition: “a reasoned train of thought.”
It seems so obvious to us now, doesn’t it? The idea of a story built around a clever thinker who pieces together clues to solve a mystery.
It’s obvious now because we’ve all seen how well these stories work. It wasn’t obvious though, until someone wrote the first one, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is widely considered the first modern detective story.
And it’s a good one.
There’s been a ghastly double murder in Paris. The clues left behind include two bags of gold coins and a bloody razor. Witnesses heard voices, but no words they could distinguish. They couldn’t even agree what language was being spoken.
That lack of decipherable language is the first clue that our detective, Monsier C. Auguste Dupin, follows in a murder mystery that goes in a surprising direction (to say the least).
Arthur Conan Doyle cited The Murders in the Rue Morgue as his primary influence in the creation of Sherlock Holmes. “Each of Poe’s detective stories is a root from which a whole literature has developed,” Doyle once said.
To honor the inventor of the detective novel, when the Mystery Writers of America decided to give out awards in their genre, they named the award the Edgar.
Inventing the detective novel is legacy enough for most writers, but not for Poe, who also invented the haunted house trope as we know it in his story The Fall of the House of Usher. The classic image of the haunted house, the idea of an oversized gothic manor that seems to be a living, breathing, haunted thing, comes from Poe’s vision of the House of Usher.
And still he wasn’t done. The shadow Poe casts on what we now call genre fiction is, without question, longer than that of any other writer. When you read Murders in the Rue Morgue, you can see the first draft of the form that would later be perfected by Agatha Christie. When you read Fall of the House of Usher you can see the seeds of the great haunted house stories that would blossom later under the pens of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.
And when you read Poe’s most famous short story you see that, once again, it was Poe who set the stage for what would become an entire section of the bookstore. Thomas Harris, Gillian Flynn, James Patterson — any author who likes to write scary stories about the psychology of a serial murderer — owes an enormous debt to Edgar Allan Poe and The Tell-Tale Heart.
If you study Poe in a literature class, your professor is likely to talk about “totality,” or Poe’s theory of literature that every scene, every sentence, every word, should all be in service of creating an effect in the reader. In The Raven he’s creating the feeling of grief so profound it makes you an enemy of the world and everything in it. In The Pit and the Pendulum he’s creating a sense of utter dread at rapidly approaching death.
In The Tell-Tale Heart, he’s allowing you to live in the mind of a madman.
“True! — nervous — -very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
Always justifying, always rationalizing…at some level the narrator of Tell-Tale Heart knows he’s insane, but he’s sane enough to tell you his story, and sane enough to make you understand why, to him, everything he does makes sense.
It made sense for him to visit the old man’s bedroom night after night and check in on his “vulture eye.” It made sense to kill the man “and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”
“If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.”
Dismember the corpse, scatter the pieces under the floorboards, congratulate yourself on how clever you are. Poe puts you in the mind of someone for whom it all makes sense.
And then the fun begins.
“It was a low, dull, quick sound — much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.”
It’s a great story to read as Halloween approaches.
“They heard! — they suspected! — they knew! — they were making a mockery of my horror! — this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now — again! — hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!”
