police

Design 28 figures

It would not be until the middle of the nineteenth century that the police detective made his literary debut. Although contemporary analyses of 'classic' detective fiction have often been concerned with the construction of 'Englishness' in the genre, the Victorian detective story was influenced by the work of overseas practitioners.




The most notable of these, was, of course, Edgar Allan Poe, and his trio of stories featuring the Parisian detective Dupin. Each of the stories are significant for study of the development of the detection genre. The first, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' (1841) pioneered the sub-genre of the 'locked room' mystery by presenting a seemingly impossible crime with a surprising solution, and Susan Sweeney has discussed the theoretical significance of the locked room for narratological theory. The second story, 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' (1843) is interesting both historically and structurally; historically, because the story is based upon the real New York murder case of Mary Rogers; structurally, because the narrative's use of newspaper reports and textual sources anticipates the kind of fragmentary structure that would be used by Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White (1860). 'The Purloined Letter' (1845) has become significant in terms of psychoanalytic theory, following Jacques Lacan's analysis of the story (concentrating on the different meanings of 'letter', and Lacan's comparison of the conscious/unconscious to language), and Jacques Derrida's reading of Lacan. But in a wider sense the stories are significant for introducing us to the figure of the detective in Dupin. Dupin would be a template for many of the detectives to appear in the late nineteenth century, in particular Sherlock Holmes (who repays the favour by dismissing Dupin as a 'very inferior fellow' in A Study in Scarlet), by placing an emphasis on intellect and ratiocination. As Julian Symons notes in Bloody Murder, 'Aristocratic, arrogant, and apparently omniscient, Dupin is what Poe often wished he could have been himself, an emotionless reasoning machine.'