STORIES OF MYSTERY AND FANTASY
Even more deeply seated and elemental than our love for the mysterious is our passion for undertaking its solution. It is this, doubtless, that challenges us to match our wits with the clever rogues of fiction, and to pit our resources of detection against the forces seen and unseen which play in tales of the weird, the mysterious, and the unexplained.
Such stories readily fall into two classes, with as many sub-sorts as the invention of man may compass—those which are soluble and those which are not. Of the former, the detective story is the more common, followed at no very great distance by the tale which seems to involve the supernatural, but whose mystery transpires quite plainly in the end. Of the latter are all those inexplicable wonder-fictions dealing with shapes that haunt the dream-dusk, the whole shadow-land of wraiths and spirits and presences and immaterialities which cross the borders of experience at the call of fantasy. They are all the inheritance of the credulous age in which romance was born, and few of us are so engirded with the armor of stoicism that we cannot enjoy their gathering goose-flesh and creeping spinal chill. Hawthorne and Poe and Irving were masters here.
The processes of inductive reasoning by which Voltaire’s Zadig reconstructed actual occurrences from trivial clues have developed into modern detective stories of uncounted variety, in which the criminal is hunted down by a professional sleuth. Then, too, the “clever amateur” often takes a hand in the game, and even accident plays at times, until there is no end to the possible combinations growing out of pure reasoning employed to unravel the tangle.
Much the same processes are employed to discover the pseudo-supernatural mystery, like Fitz-James O’Brien’s solved ghost-story, “What Was It? A Mystery.” But when we enter the domain of the unexplained, the story tends to become a study of fear and of pure mystery, like Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth,” and “The Damned Thing,” by Ambrose Bierce.
Poe was the great American originator of the detective story, and to-day his “Purloined Letter,” reproduced here in full, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” are unsurpassed.