Edgar Allen Poe

Everybody likes to read books or watch movies that make them think. An intriguing detective story will keep its readers on the edge of their seats. When reading these certain stories, one must wonder, “What was the first detective story?” and “Who wrote it?” The off-kilter Edgar Allen Poe was the first author of a detective story. In fact, Edgar Allen Poe’s detective stories, despite the harsh criticism they received, had a major influence on the forming of the detective genre and set the basic model of the detective story we know today.

How is a detective story unique and different from the average narrative? Willard Huntington Wright once explained a detective story effectively saying, “I believe the detective novel does not fall under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense, but belongs rather in the category of riddle; it is in fact, a complicated and extended puzzle cast in fictional form” (Wright 2). The detective story is in fact a puzzle, which the reader is forced to unravel. Detective stories are full of patterns. Creating patterns are what detective stories are about, Poe wanted to discover the patterns that were already there. Many of the detective story writers simply had to unravel the story themselves and put it back together for the readers to enjoy taking it back apart (May 83). Essentially, reading a detective story is like doing a cross-work puzzle.

Why did Poe write a detective story? What influenced him? Poe’s obsession with the idea of scientific experimentation influenced his thirst for an analytic story. His detective stories were analytical stories. They represented the ideas and problems that fascinated him (Wright 2). After a deep analysis of Poe’s detective story, one can see that Poe actually was projecting himself into the narrator. He, in fact, had some respect for Dupin, a character he created (May 92). He wanted to obviously make others feel the way he did about Dupin, thus he wrote the detective story. Poe has always been obsessed with the psychology of death and murder. R. J. C. Watt believed that Poe’s detective stories combine logic and an insight on the grotesque and the violent (Watt 1). All of the elements of Poe’s other stories are found in his detective story.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote many analytical stories, which are now considered detective stories. His four most famous stores are “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, “The Purloined Letter” and “The Gold Bug” (May 87). Poe’s first detective story was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, which he published in Graham’s Magazine in April 1841 (Watt 1). In that story he introduced the first detective character ever written, C. Auguste Dupin. Poe didn’t get immediate fame for his work. As a matter of fact, it took him two years, in 1843 to receive recognition for his detective story “The Gold Bug”. He even won a one hundred dollar prize for it, held by the Dollar Newspaper (Carlson 40). For the most part, however, Poe’s stories were well received by the public, but weren’t appreciated for being the first detective story; Mainly because this was a new type of story to be introduced at that time.

Many writers found a new angle at literature through Poe’s detective story. So much that he influenced many writers that we know today, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. According to Willard Wright, “If we call Poe the father of detective fiction, Gaboriau was certainly its first influential tutor” (Wright 8). Gaboriau introduced the sleuth, Monsieur Lecoq. Many other authors realized there was an audience for the detective story. Many Authors like Anna Katharine Green, Doyle, and Christie took Poe’s original form to create detective stories. Many other characters were produced such as Sherlock Holmes and Detective