It’s important to note that Edgar Allen Poe wrote during what’s been dubbed the “American Romantic” period. In these years — roughly 1830 to the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 — none of our modern literary genres existed. No one was perusing shelves at a local Barnes & Noble and looking for the latest eye-catching young adult novel cover. In fact, Poe was so ahead of the curve that in addition to pioneering the detective novel and some gloriously macabre fiction, he was also arguably the “architect” of the modern short story, itself (per Poets.org). Bear in mind that the “novel,” as a type of book, didn’t exist until 1605 with the publishing of “Don Quixote,” less than 250 years before Poe wrote. During Poe’s life there were no hard distinctions between novels and the kind of shorter stories that he wrote.
Not only did Poe pave the path for all subsequent gumshoes to poke through crime scene evidence and make deductions, he did it using the same kind of serialized detective character reflected in later persons like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, all the way to Columbo and more. Poe’s arch-crime-solver was Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, who uses the aforementioned “ratiocination” (reason, logic, etc.) to figure out who murdered two women in 1841’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe wrote two more stories featuring Dupin in the lead role: 1842’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and 1844’s “The Purloined Letter.”
[Featured image by Unknown author via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled]
