The fact is ... that, in the riddle story, the detective was an after-thought, or, more accurately, a deus ex machina to make the story go. The riddle had to be unriddled; and who could do it so naturally and readily as a detective? The detective, as Poe saw him, was a means to this end; and it was only afterwards that writers perceived his availability as a character. Lecoq accordingly becomes a figure in fiction, and Sherlock, while he was as yet a novelty, was nearly as attractive as the complications in which he involved himself.—Julian Hawthorne, Introduction to The Lock and Key Library.
The literature of ghosts is very ancient. In visions of the night, and in the lurid vapors of mystic incantations, figures rise and smile, or frown and disappear. The Witch of Endor murmurs her spell, and “an old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle.” Macbeth takes a bond of fate, and from Hecate’s caldron, after the apparition of an armed head and that of a bloody child, “an apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises.” The wizard recounts to Lochiel his warning vision, and Lochiel departs to his doom. There are stories of the Castle of Otranto and of The Three Spaniards, and the infinite detail of “singular experiences,” which make our conscious daily life the frontier and border-land of an impinging world of mystery.—George William Curtis, Introduction to Modern Ghosts.
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.
POE AND HIS WRITINGS
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. His father, of a good Maryland family, was an actor, and his mother an actress of English extraction. Both parents dying before Edgar was three, he, with his brother William and sister Rosalie, was left homeless in Richmond, where each found a protector. Mrs. Allan adopted Edgar, giving him his middle name, and bestowing at the same time every opportunity that wealth could offer. He was sent to school at Stoke Newington, England, attended a private school in Richmond, and entered the University of Virginia, but remained there less than a year, for his reckless and erratic temperament champed under the restraints of routine. He was placed in Mr. Allan’s counting-room, but ran away to enlist in the United States Army as “Edgar Allan Perry.” After the death of Mrs. Allan, her husband secured Poe’s discharge from the army and his appointment to West Point as a cadet, July 1, 1830; but after six months Poe contrived to be dismissed. He had already published his poems successfully, so he went to New York, in the early part of 1831, to begin his professional literary life. For four years—1833 to 1837—he wrote brilliantly for The Southern Literary Messenger, in Baltimore. Then he went successively to New York and Philadelphia, where he worked on various literary enterprises for six years. In 1844 he returned to New York, and became assistant to N. P. Willis, in whose journal, The Mirror, “The Raven” appeared in 1845. Poe’s literary reputation was now established both in America and abroad, most of his masterpieces having been created during the turbulent years of his wanderings. In 1835 he had been married to Virginia Clemm, his cousin, and her early death in 1847 broke his spirit. His health had already succumbed to his morbid temperament—which magnified every sorrow of his chaotic career—and to the excesses of drugs and drink. He died most unhappily, October 7, 1849, at the age of forty—a master spirit pitifully wrecked before his prime.