![]() Poe was also a literary critic, and he created a rationale for the detective story. All five stories are dark in tone, with characters whose motives are unknowable, as well as the unexpected endings common to the gothic novel in Poe’s time. In “The Gold Bug,” which many think Poe’s finest mystery, a man finds an encrypted map that promises the discovery of hidden treasure. Of the other two Poe stories, “Thou Art the Man” presents three important motifs: 1) the criminal confesses when faced with the enormity of his crime, 2) the detective follows a trail of false clues, and 3) he deduces that the criminal is the least likely suspect. Though this mystery contained no solution (it was in court at the time), leaving the reader to deduce a solution, it marked the beginning of the genre’s use of and competition with newspapers in presenting the “truth about crime” to readers. In the third Dupin story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” Poe introduced and developed the crime by recounting newspaper clippings, a technique that later attracted the literary realists and is still used. ![]() Dupin solved this crime by two more important formulae: deduction through psychological insight into the protagonists, and a search for evidence in the most obvious place. In a second story, “The Purloined Letter,” Poe invented the plot of the stolen document, the recovery of which ensures the safety of some important person. Dupin solved the crime by reading the evidence better than the police did and by noticing clues that they had neglected, thus highlighting the importance of inference and observation. In “Rue Morgue,” Poe introduced three common motifs of detective fiction: the wrongly suspected man, the crime in the locked room, and the solution by unexpected means. Later detectives, notably Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, became even more eccentric, and Poe’s nameless narrator had his counterpart in the amiable Dr. ![]() Auguste Dupin, whose solutions were chronicled by an admiring, amiable narrator. In “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe introduced his brilliant, eccentric detective, C. In five stories between 18, Poe laid out the basics of the detective story, which underlie much hard-boiled fiction. In the United States, the detective novel developed when an ambitious Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) read Charles Dickens, and then read and reread Vidocq. ![]()
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