Text: W. A. B. (William Arthur Boord?), “Introduction” in Monsieur Dupin: The Detective Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1904, pp. iii-xiv

[page iii, unnumbered:]

INTRODUCTION

The five stories that are here reprinted are given a classification of their own by Stedman and Woodberry in their edition of Poe's works, as Tales of Ratiocination. The grouping I have retained, but not the precise order, for I have wished in the present collection to throw the emphasis upon the stories as detective stories and upon the character of M. C. Auguste Dupin, who appears in but three of the five. Hence I have placed first, not “The Gold-Bug,” which is scarcely a detective story at all, though the methods employed in it for the discovery of hidden treasure are identical with those employed in the others for the detection of crime, but “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which that talented amateur, M. Dupin, is introduced, and his methods are explained. [page iv:] Then follow, as in the edition referred to, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter,” which completes the Dupin cycle, and “Thou Art the Man,” which, although there is in it more of the grotesque and extravagant, is still a detective story. “The Gold-Bug,” which closes the volume, might have been omitted altogether without detriment to the unity of the collection. But I have been unwilling, even for the sake of such unity, to omit a tale that displays so wonderfully, although in another field, those brilliant reasoning powers which, quite aside from their dual fascination of terror and mystery, give the group as a whole their peculiar and perennial interest.

Poe is universally recognized as the father of the detective story. He was the first to perceive the literary possibilities of that form of mental activity involved in the ferreting out by the sleuths of the law, from dark clues and apparently insufficient data, the secrets of baffling and mysterious crimes. Crime itself was a common enough motive in the fiction of [page v:] Poe's day. A favorite theme for a “Blackwood's Story” — Poe had a sovereign contempt for the type — was a bizarre and outrageous crime the horrible and unnatural features of which were dwelt upon and elaborated with a morbid or melodramatic insistence. But, while the interest generally turned on a mystery connected with its commission, the denouement, which consisted in the revelation of the guilty person, did not result from the employment of the processes of ratiocination, but from some strange accident or coincidence, some quasi-supernatural agency of nature or of conscience, wherein one seemed to detect the hand of God.

One may say that Poe did not believe in Providence, or at least in its employment for artistic purposes. He had a repugnance for those combinations of fortuitous circumstances from which other writers were wont either to derive sensational effects or to assert the operation in the physical universe of a moral law of justice. Hence his interest in the subject-matter of criminology was of an entirely different order. For the murder itself he cared little, [page vi:] and for the moral issues and dramatic value still less; but when it was attended by circumstances that obscured the motive and the identity of the perpetrator, he was attracted as by a problem in chess or mathematics, and proceeded to frame a theory based upon the clues in the case and the general laws of chance. And in the same way, but in the reverse order, he would, failing an actual case, premise a set of clues and then proceed to induce from them, working backwards, a complete and elaborate fiction of his own invention. He had then only to eliminate the intermediate stages in the process, in order to have in all its essentials the basis of the modern detective story.

Here, then, is the genesis of an artistic form that was wholly original with Poe and that no other writer had even anticipated. Simple as it may appear, it required, nevertheless, a higher degree of intellectuality than was ordinarily employed in the lighter forms of narrative art. But Poe was fundamentally a philosopher, to whom by caprice nature had given the sensibility of an artist. The exercise of the mind [page vii:] in its highest functions, even without an object, merely as a game, had for him ever the highest fascination. Even from the romantic point of view he regarded it as the ultimate form of human activity. Compared with an excursion into the domains of inductive analysis or the calculus of probabilities, a voyage to the most inaccessible quarter of the globe would have seemed tame and devoid of interest, although the “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” shows what Poe's imagination could make of the nineteenth century spirit of exploration and discovery.

Not, indeed, that he was indifferent, even when engaged in the solution of the most intricate problems of analysis, to the secondary romantic considerations of place and circumstance as enhancements of the main interest. Hence he was led to lay the scene of his three most famous detective stories in Paris. Poe had never visited that city, but he had studied its topography and saturated himself with its nomenclature until he had succeeded in completely realizing the special atmosphere of the place. Indeed, [page viii:] paradoxical as it may seem, we doubt if any one else has ever felt Paris as Poe felt it, with so delicate an imaginative perception of its oppressive antiquity, of its crazy dilapidation and squalor in places, and of the forsakenness of human life in its haunts in the dark alleys and under the bridges of the Seine, forever giving up its nameless dead. The Morgue! that is the symbol of one side of Paris. And with what extraordinary sense of keeping did Poe choose this word for the name of the street in which he placed his grisly tragedy. A French critic took Poe to task when this story appeared in the Charivari , for having chosen the name of a street that did not exist. It exists, however, far more truly than many a real street in that city, exists as part of that imperishable plan that shall survive when of Lutetia of the Parisians there is not left standing one stone upon another. Poe's Paris is a city of the mind, and its precincts and purlieus, steeped in mystery and haunted with horror, are the scenes of a strange and disquieting general human tragedy in which [page ix:]

But though Poe was careful about these matters as part of his art, it is easy to see that his interest in his stories was the interest of the mind in its own operations and in the triumph of its alertness and acuteness over the problems proposed for its solution. His main purpose was to create in Dupin a character who should embody in its highest degree the power of the human intellect to proceed from the slightest clues and the “faintest prominences above the plane of the ordinary,” to use his own phrase, to the penetration of the most remote and baffling mystery. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” he regarded merely as a character study, and “Marie Roget “ as an indication of the manner in which his own methods might be applied, not only to a fictitious set of circumstances carefully arranged to yield [page x:] to the pressure of the key for which the lock had been constructed, but to an actual case that had occurred in New York and in which the mystery had remained unsolved. The story is somewhat of a disappointment as fiction since it fails of a denouement. Poe's interest went no further than the discovery of the essential clue, after which he is content to dismiss the subject with a few remarks on the coincidences in the two cases and on the nature of chance in general. The ordinary reader, however, cannot be expected to be of a complexion so purely philosophical, and he may be pardoned for a feeling of slight vexation when, at the end of the story, he finds himself deprived of the privilege of being in at the death.

But no such fault can be found with “The Purloined Letter.” This is the masterpiece of the series, regarded simply as fiction. It is less an essay in inductive analysis and more of a story than either of the others. It has, indeed, and with reason, been called the best detective story ever written. The mystification at the outset is complete, yet the solution [page xi:] is reached by means that are really startling in their ease, simplicity and naturalness. This is where Poe triumphs. He never has recourse to artifice or to strained hypotheses. When all is over, one follows easily the different steps by which the result has been arrived at, and does not question the logic or the legitimacy of the methods pursued. There is no appeal to the sensational nor is there any dazzling of the imagination by bizarre tours de force that make the reader lose himself in the writer's ingenuity and inventiveness and forget to ask if what he has witnessed be actually within the range of human performance.

Since Poe the detective story has had many vicissitudes. Gaboriau developed its sensational and melodramatic features and gave the model for countless imitators. Stevenson had a fondness for Gaboriau, but burlesqued his method in “The Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders,” which forms part of the “New Arabian Nights.” The burlesque was not sufficiently severe to kill the form as “Don Quixote” killed the vogue of the romances of chivalry, [page xii:] but it may, at least, have had the effect of sending Dr. Doyle back to Poe rather than to Gaboriau for his model. Hence Sherlock Holmes is the reincarnation of M. Dupin, the brilliant amateur, rather than of Lecoq, the professional detective. Dupin, to be sure, is, more than Holmes, the embodiment of pure intellect. For this reason he lacks Holmes's interest as a character, although Poe, with his curious power of investing abstractions with personality, makes him a singularly effective figure. On the other hand, and perhaps because this very human interest requires it, Holmes is less infallible as an instrument of sheer ratiocinative power. He is occasionally thrown off the scent as Dupin never is, and is sometimes obliged to have recourse to those expedients of professional detection which Dupin never employs.

Poe has been a factor of singular importance in the artistic and literary history of the nineteenth century. It is surprising how a writer who, from an American point of view, represents little beyond the discovery, [page xiii:] almost childlike in its eager intensity, of the very material of romance so long denied it by isolation and by the newness and practicality of its own environment, should have contributed so extensively to movements of which he himself could have had no conception. For France, Poe ranks with Hugo as the fructifying genius of modern movements, and symbolism, mysticism, occultism, and the art of the decadence, all owe to him more than will ever be realized, until the history of our age has been completely written a hundred years hence. Compared with this larger indebtedness of the whole of the art of our time to Poe's genius, the fact of his having originated the form of the detective story seems a matter of relatively slight significance. Yet the persistence of the form throughout a century, and the vitality which it still exhibits in our own day, prove its right to be regarded as one of the types of modern literature, like the sea story or the novel of manners. It transforms one phase of our complex social life, a phase in itself sufficiently sordid, into the material for romance. But perhaps its prime importance is not as [page xiv:] a distinct type standing alone and tending to degenerate on the one hand into mere ingenuity and on the other into crude sensationalism, but a factor in the development of the novel of Dickens and his school, wherein the highly developed intrigue or plot involving elements of crime, mystery and detection, bears clear evidence of the influence exercised by Poe upon the matter and method of modern fiction.

W. A. B.