No, an orangutan didn’t sneak into Scalia’s room through an open window
Conspiracy theories have their roots in murder mystery literature
Ever since Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead last weekend, there have been inspired conspiracy theories concerning his final hours. It’s not hard to see why: A powerful man, no stranger to controversy, passes away in a locked room at a remote luxury hunting lodge while on vacation with politically connected friends.
You don’t have to be Edgar Allen Poe to make this into a detective story.
As it turns out, Poe is the one who invented what is known as the “locked-room mystery” where a victim is killed in a situation where they seem impossibly safe. His 1841 story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” launched the genre with a tale of two gory deaths in a locked fourth-floor apartment. A mother has had her throat slashed; her daughter was found in the chimney.
It was the sort of tale that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dame Agatha Christie would make their fortunes by writing. But Poe wasn’t as clever as those two: His crime was committed by — and spoilers, despite this being 175 years old — an escaped pet orangutan, who snuck in through a window and panicked.
We should mention that Edgar Allen Poe had a drinking problem.
Ridiculous as the killer ape was, the idea of using a murder as a plot device was revelatory. Great detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercules Poirot, and everyone Gillian Anderson has ever portrayed has their roots in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
And as for the expansive country estate? English authors set their murders there because their working-class audiences enjoyed a lurid glance at the rich and indolent (the workaday murders of Law & Order were a made-for-TV innovation). As long as the wealthy have their escapes, laypeople want to know what they’re up to. Or, with detective fiction, what they could be up to if they were sick and twisted enough.
The search for a meaning in death is a search for a meaning in the deceased’s life. In mystery novels a person doesn’t die just because their heart gave out or a blood vessel blows, but because some narrative from their past caught up with them to settle a score. Or an orangutan snuck into their room and grabbed hold of a straight razor. Either way, real life doesn’t work like that.
Antonin Scalia died peacefully in his sleep, at the age of 79.
