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Locked Rooms and Mean Streets
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20468 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
3,902 Words |
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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When the Chevalier Auguste Dupin arrived at the L'Espanaye home in the Rue Morgue, he found a scene of ghastly carnage and disarray. Two women had been mutilated and murdered--one had been thrust upside down into the chimney. The chamber's entrances and exits were tightly sealed. Available evidence pointed to some supernatural agency, some uncanny ferocity at work. Dupin was unruffled. "It is not too much to say that neither of us believes in preternatural events," he said. "Madame and Mademoiselle L'Espanaye were not destroyed by spirits. The doers of the deed were material, and escaped materially." The amateur detective paused dramatically before concluding--"Then, how?"
By general consensus, Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," published in Graham's Magazine in 1841, was the world's first detective story. It was followed by two other Dupin adventures, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter" (1843-44). Poe referred to them as "tales of ratiocination," exercises in observation and rational inquiry. Their importance to the development of the modern detective story can scarcely be overestimated. Dupin himself, as historian Howard Haycraft has observed, became the prototype for every popular American and European detective/sleuth for the next hundred years.
Although he was writing in America, Poe looked to the Old World for his inspiration. America at the time had no equivalent to the English Bow Street Runners (later the detective department of the metropolitan police) and the French Surete. Dupin himself was modeled after a real life French detective, Eugene-Francois Vidocq of the Paris police. Formerly a convicted felon who had turned informant, Vidocq had been appointed chief of the newly formed surete in 1812. His popular Memoirs, published in Paris in 1828-29 (and probably ghostwritten by Emile Morice and Louise-Francois L'Heritier) were among the first accounts of professional crime fighting made available to the public--and they made for sensational reading. By his own admission, he was a master of disguise and thoroughly familiar with the workings of the criminal mind. His boasts anticipated Dupin and Holmes by decades: "Nothing escapes me, either relating to crimes which had been committed, or were in contemplation. I was in all places; I knew all that was passing or projecting." As historian Ian Ousby writes in Bloodhounds of Heaven, "The Memoirs introduced a number of motifs with which the fictional detective was to be associated throughout the century."
Furthermore, the mood and melodramatic apparatus of the Dupin stories were an extension of Ann Radcliffe's
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