1
Edgar Allan Poe and the Detective
Story Narrative
The problem that makes the purest appeal to logic for its
solution. It highlights the ‘closed’ nature of the detective tale
and is, unquestionably, its most traditional expression. I am
speaking of what has come to be referred to as ‘the locked room
mystery’.
Donald A. Yates, ‘An Essay on Locked Rooms’1
Pure reason, incapable of any limitation, is the deity itself.
Hegel, ‘The Life of Jesus’2
One of the more remarkable facts about detective fiction, a genre which
has now assumed epic proportions, is its foundation of just three short
stories, an experiment to be abandoned by its creator almost as quickly
as it appeared. For Edgar Allan Poe, the publication of ‘The Murders
in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841, followed by ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’
(1842–3) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), was to represent the extent
of his output in this field. Although he always seemed diffident about his
foray into detective fiction, being ‘conscious of the inherent gimmickry’
of the tales, he nevertheless realized that he was in uncharted literary
territory.3 In a letter to a friend, he wrote, ‘these tales of ratiocination
owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key’.4 This
‘new key’ was characterized by the representation of crime as an intel-
lectual puzzle, invoking the practice of scientism in clue solving and
heralding the detective as a major literary figure. So complete was Poe’s
innovation that the narrative structure he composed for these tales was
to become a blueprint for all subsequent detective stories. Thus the
locked room of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, as a prototype for
detective fiction with its accent on enclosures, death and references to
M. Cook, Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction
© Michael Cook 2011
2 Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction
sequestered lives, not only became a paradigm for the way in which the
genre would function structurally, but carried with it an idea central to
Poe’s Gothic texts.
Just as Poe drew on his own writing for the ideas of architectural
and metaphysical enclosures, his representation of ratiocination was
the product of an eclectic distillation from other literal sources, rather
than a flash of personal inspiration. The fact that such techniques had
been part of a long textual chain is undeniable: in Sophocles’ Oedipus
the King, for example, Oedipus conducts a series of interrogations in an
attempt to discover the murderer of King Laius. Shakespeare has long
been the source of inspiration for writers of detective fiction who have
used his plots and made myriad references to his plays in their own
works. Hamlet (1602), which at its most basic is the pursuit of a mur-
derer, contains no less than six corpses, including murder by the pouring
of poison into the ear. The death of Hamlet’s father is also re-enacted
as the subterfuge of a play within a play, a stratagem worthy of any
self-respecting detective story. In Othello (1604) Iago lays a false trail, a
familiar device of crime writers, to implicate Desdemona by placing her
handkerchief with Cassio. In Voltaire’s Zadig (1750) too, the eponymous
hero escapes imprisonment by convincing his accusers that his detailed
description of a lost horse and dog derives only from close examination
of the animals’ tracks and hair fibres.
The tradition is particularly apparent in detective fiction’s more imme-
diate precursor. William Godwin’s propagandist novel Caleb Williams
(1794) depicts a servant who is tracked by his villainous master after
employing investigative methods worthy of a detective. Its relevance
to detective fiction, in particular, is of an early crime story involv-
ing investigation and pursuit leading to arrest, and in these respects
it lays out a narrative rubric which will be followed by its successors.
Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) has the dénouement turn on deductions
made with false logic, whilst Eugene Aram (1832), a novelization of an
infamous eighteenth-century crime, foreshadows the inverted form of
detective fiction by recounting the story of a crime from the standpoint
of the criminal. It relates the story of a schoolmaster driven to murder by
poverty and finally racked by remorse, and features a putative detective
called Walter Lester. However, in all these novels, although detection
plays a part it is not the dominant narrative. As Stephen Knight has
suggested:
Throughout this material there is evident a widespread awareness
that some form of expert police work is needed in order to have any
