At the end of this seminar paper, the following questions should be answered: Has nobody ever written a detective story before or are there preforms that are related to detective stories? Is Edgar Allan Poe really the inventor of detective fiction? 2. The last focus on this thesis is the adaption of the characteristics of a typical detective story (that have been worked out in chapter 2.1) to easily check if Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a real detective story. The following chapter 2.2 is about the current state of research about the origins of detective fiction and appoints compositions that are discussed in scientific productions to be ancestors of the detective genre. As a first step, chapter 2.1 of this seminar paper introduces to the characteristics of a typical detective story. It tries to find out if Poe really is the inventor of detective fiction or if there had been any detective stories prior to his Dupin works. This seminar paper investigates the role of Poe in the history of the detective story as a genre. Nobody knows exactly what killed him (cf. Poe’s death in 1849 may be one of the most bizarre things about his life. It is a pity that “unlike all the rest of his literary contemporaries, he had never a dollar in his live save with his pen (Pattee 120)”, whereas his works are now studied and enjoyed wherever we read about English. Nowadays, Poe still has a great influence on American and world literature (cf. He ever dreamed of founding his own magazine, but this never happened. “He was a magazinist, fitting from magazine to magazine, now as editor, now as contributing assistant, now as hack writer and literary adventurer (Pattee 119)”. For this reason, he even considered giving up writing and and wrote for very low wages (cf. His whole lifetime, he was poor and had problems to secure an editorship. His wife, his “greatest and only stimulus to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory and ungrateful life (Thompson xl) 3, died “amid surroundings of utter poverty (Pattee 120)” early at the age of 24. He lived a bleak life which was characterized by his scandalous biography: alcohol, drugs 2, financial problems and his marriage with his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm when he was 27 (cf. “Before (…) Edgar was old enough to remember them, both of his parents were dead (Pattee 116)” and the rest of his life was not coined by luck as well. On January 19th, 1809 Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts (cf. Furthermore, many claim him to be the father of the detective story and the question, if he really is, is supposed to be the main topic of this seminar paper. He was a master of suspense and of the macabre and succeeded in many different types of literature such as horror, poetry, criticism, mystery, tales and sketches. Rachman 25).Įdgar Allan Poe was one of the most famous American authors, who is especially famous for his over seventy short stories. With these words, the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, author of The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries 1, emphasises the importance of Edgar Allan Poe, who had influenced not only his own work but also the whole genre of detective fiction (cf. To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime … Each may find some little development on his own, but his main art must trace back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin (Doyle 117-118, quoted from Rachman 25)”. C onclusion: Poe as the Undisputed Father of the Detective Story He is very much a Poe creation, with the gore and horror of the murder details described with a relish and a realism not allowed by many other writers.2.2 Origins of Detective Fiction/ Early Ancestors of the Genreģ.1 The Murders in the Rue Morgue – Which Typical Elements of Detective Fiction are already Present in Poe’s Dupin Stories?ģ.2 What did Poe himself Say about his Detective Stories?Ĥ. Narrated by his friend and admirer, and documenting an eccentricity that charms the reader into liking what would otherwise be an insufferable arrogance, the stories bear the obvious mark of what was to become the most famous of detectives: Sherlock Holmes. Using his extraordinary intellect, Dupin solves a seemingly baffling crime from the clues left by the perpetrator – clues overlooked by mere mortals like the police. The first tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, details a form of murder solving that was to become only too familiar. The three tales that make up Edgar Allan Poe’s The Dupin Mysteries introduce us to the cracking character of Chevalier Auguste Dupin.Īs a rationalist and practitioner of brilliant deduction, he was to become the template for most of the detective fiction that followed speedily in his wake.
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