![]() ![]() Bucket’s creator, Charles Dickens, was a great admirer of Poe’s work, to the extent that he met with Poe in Philadelphia during his 1842 tour of America and undertook (without success) to find him a publisher in England. Nevertheless, “The Purloined Letter” has been highly influential in psychological studies of the detective, and speculation that Dupin and his criminal mastermind adversary Minister D- could be one and the same served to heighten interest in uncovering parallels between the policeman’s mind and that of the criminal.Īlthough not a detective by profession, Poe’s decadent aristocrat indubitably contributed to the depiction of the next significant literary detective-Inspector Bucket of Bleak House (1851-3), an officer of the law. Whilst many readers come away disappointed or frustrated with the revelation at the end of the first locked room mystery, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin’s gradual cataloging of the evidence around him to reveal the unanticipated identity of the murderer is a breath-taking example of what we might today describe as “thinking out of the box.” The subsequent two Dupin stories are widely regarded as less impressive than the original. Like Holmes, Dupin is a semiotician, or one who studies and interprets signs, gathering his evidence from the minutiae at the scene of the crime and bringing a phenomenal knowledge of human behavior to bear on his analyses. *ĭupin’s modes of investigation and his treatment of each case as a cerebral exercise greatly influenced subsequent literary incarnations of the detective, most notably the great Sherlock Holmes. ![]() A view which is exemplified by his decision to set “The Mystery of Marie Rôget” in Paris even though the case it was based on, the apparent murder of Mary Cecelia Rogers, took place in New York. However, it is evident that in Poe’s mind a great detective could only be French-like Vidocq. Mike Ashley commented in a previous issue of The Strand that, “Although the character of Dupin is not based specifically on Vidocq, he was very clearly developed from the world that Vidocq had created.” It may seem strange that, although never having visited France, Poe was able to create a trilogy of detective stories that seemed to capture the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Paris so well. Dupin is particularly remarkable for having made his appearance before the establishment of the detective police at Scotland Yard and, as Julian Symons has commented, “it is a tribute to Poe’s inventive genius that his stories had so little to do with actual police operations.” If Poe drew upon any source at all, it was almost certainly (in spite of Dupin’s protestations to the contrary) the memoirs of criminal-turned-detective and memoirist, François Eugene Vidocq. Like the later Sherlock Holmes, Poe’s detective is an amateur who gradually becomes a consultant to the official Prefect when cases appear too tough to crack by the regular means. He was brought back in “The Mystery of Marie Rôget” (1850) and “The Purloined Letter” (dated 1845, but first published in “The Gift annual in 1844). Auguste Dupin, made his debut in the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” first published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841. The first detective to appear in literature in English was created by the American author Edgar Allan Poe. ![]() The detective story we know today did not come into existence until the 1840’s, and even then the genre took time to evolve from the short story, to the novel featuring a detective, to the full-blown detective novel-the first of these being The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins. Hence, the newly-professionalized officers of the law came to be perceived as heroes, both in fiction and in fact, and as the popularity of detective police grew, so did public enthusiasm for literary depictions of the inspector at work. The recodification of the criminal law in Britain to protect the property interests of a growing middle class, along with a reduction in the number of petty hanging offenses, combined to help gradually change the perception of the Law from a means of oppressing people to a means of protecting them. ![]() As Ernest Mandel reminds us in his classic study of the crime genre, Delightful Murder, the late 1820’s saw a crucial turning point in the literary representation of the criminal, who had, throughout the eighteenth century, been depicted as a kind of folk hero, as typified by Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743). The nineteenth century saw a radical alteration in attitudes toward crime and criminals, with the establishment of the Metropolitan Police Force by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, followed by the founding of its detective division in 1842. THE GREAT DETECTIVES: DUPIN, SERGEANT CUFF & INSPECTOR BUCKET BY GRACE MOORE ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |