1846 Alright, maybe Poe didn’t actually invent the novel of detection – that distinction is claimed by E.T.A. Hoffman, whose Das Fräulein von Scuderi came out in 1819 – but he set the conventions for the genre as we know it, from Conan Doyle to Raymond Chandler. Detectives are not policemen – far from it. They may be anything from seedy private dicks to scholars of a retiring disposition, but they will work outside the police investigation, often incurring the suspicion of the flat-footed regulars. The detective will often have a sidekick who doubles as narrator of the tale. Most important – and this gives the genre its name – the process of catching the culprit depends on detection, or reasoning from evidence.
In Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, first published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and his friend read in the papers about the horrific murder of two women, one with her throat cut and the other strangled, then stuffed half-way up a chimney. Normally retiring and asocial, Dupin is intrigued and visits the scene of the crime, and – through a series of deductions – works out that the ‘murderer’ was a pet orang-utan that had escaped its owner, after grabbing his straight-edge razor while he was shaving.
But in a letter to the lawyer and minor poet Philip P. Cooke written on this day, Poe played down the significance of his invention. ‘These tales of ratiocination [as he called his detective stories] owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key’, he wrote. ‘People think them more ingenious than they are.’ To take ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for example, ‘where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.’
Important as this passage seems now, it wasn’t Poe’s main concern in the letter. He was anxious to sign Cooke up for his planned compendium of ‘Literary America’ (a grand project, never completed), as the author of the essay on himself. To that end, he wanted to pass on Elizabeth Barrett’s good opinion of his poem ‘The Raven’ – ‘This vivid writing! – this power which is felt!’ – as conveyed in a recent letter. ‘Would it be bad taste to quote these words of Miss B. in your notice?’ Opportunistic? Maybe, but don’t forget that Poe was the first American to make his living solely through creative writing. It was never too late in one’s career for a touch of log-rolling.