Read Online Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins - Free Book Online

modern anonymity. As 1841 began, though, Poe’s luck seemed to change; he claimed he was one week from delivering the first issue to the printer.
    “You wish to know my prospects with the Penn ,” he wrote to one contributor. “They are glorious .”
    They did not remain so. On February 4, a run on banks sent business credit crashing; any prospect of Penn coming out soon was instantly annihilated. Scarcely two weeks later, George Graham, the buyer from Burton of the redubbed Graham’s Magazine , broke the bittersweet news to his readers: Penn was over, but Poe was to come back as an editor at Graham’s . What readers did not know was that Poe also brought with him a remarkable story—“something in a new key,” as he put it, which he had perhaps planned to use to launch Penn . They were about to become the witnesses to literary history.
    “It is not improbable that a few farther steps in phrenological science will lead to a belief in the existence, if not the actual discoveryand location, of an organ of analysis ,” Poe’s article in the April 1841 Graham’s began, noting that a man notably endowed in his analytical organ “is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics—exhibiting in his solutions of each and all a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.”
    Graham’s readers might have fairly assumed Poe was talking about himself; he was indeed about to revive his cryptography challenge to them, boasting in one letter that “Nothing intelligible can be written which, with time, I cannot decipher.” Yet the opening lines in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” are not about himself, but his greatest literary creation: C. Auguste Dupin, amateur detective.
    So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre. True, ancestors may be claimed in everything from Voltaire to thirteenth-century Chinese literature, but in Poe’s story of the mysterious and horrific double murder of a Parisian pensioner and her daughter, the conventions of the modern detective were so immediately and perfectly realized as to almost defy belief. The haughtily brilliant and eccentric protagonist; the introductory vignette to show off his deductive powers to an earnest and easily amazed sidekick; the diligent but unimaginative police baffled by seemingly conflicting clues; the impossible “locked room” crime scene; the dramatic drawing-room confrontation of a suspect—it is all there, as fully formed as the grown Athena sprung forth from Zeus.
    The story had some earthly parentage, of course. Along with Poe’s beloved puzzle-solving, the previous decade had also seen the rise of true-crime reporting, both in James Curtis’s ground-breaking book The Murder of Maria Marten (1827) and James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald coverage in 1836 of the murder of Helen Jewett. But the story’s most direct influence was the world’s first actual private detective—Eugene FrancoisVidocq, a French ex-con who parlayed his criminal expertise into a still rather larcenous career on the other side of the law. Poe was mindful enough of Vidocq’s fanciful Memoirs (1828) that he drew Dupin’s name from them—and then drolly had his own Parisian detective faintly praise Vidocq as “a good guesser.”
    In initiating the world’s most popular genre of fiction, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is literally the most influential short story of the nineteenth century. Poe himself knew he had written something special, though even he could hardly imagine to what degree. As he idly drew up plans for yet another story collection, this one to be called Phantasy-Pieces , he placed “Rue Morgue” as the lead story; yet that plan never went any further than his own desk. While the story received some warm praise upon its publication, its true importance would only slowly become apparent in the decades to