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

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    Instead, Poe was kept busy with his new editorial duties; though these were lighter under Graham than with Burton, he was again swamped with reviewing, puzzling over reader cryptograms, and gathering author signatures for a magazine spread on literary autographs. He soon had the opportunity to get one in person; when Charles Dickens came through Philadelphia in 1842, Poe leapt at the chance to meet him, sending copies of his books as a calling card to Dickens’s room two blocks away at the United States Hotel.
    The two met twice, with Dickens not only generously promising to try to find Poe a British publisher, but also offering up a curious anecdote when talk turned to the 1794 novel Caleb Williams: “Do you know that Godwin wrote it backwards —the last volume first,” Dickens mused to Poe, noting that the author then “waited for months, casting about for a means of accounting for what he had done ?”
    This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called “tales of ratiocination”—his own name for detective stories—Poe later remarked,“People think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”
    Yet even Poe found himself unexpectedly stumped in writing his newly created genre. In the spring of 1842, he undertook writing a sequel to “Rue Morgue”—his first sequel ever, and his first use of a recurring character. As with Politian , his raw material was an actual crime—in this case, the mysterious death a year earlier of Mary Rogers, popularly dubbed the “beautiful cigar girl,” who clerked at a Manhattan shop frequented by writers and perhaps by Poe himself. Her disappearance, and the discovery of her body three days later in the Hudson River, occasioned paroxysms in the press about everything from gang violence to police ineptitude in failing to solve the crime. For “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” Poe transposed the case to Dupin’s Paris—and then, in a bizarre turn, acknowledged Mary Rogers in his story as a separate murder of “scarcely intelligible coincidences . . . recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS , at New York.”
    As in his earliest works, here Poe lacks the conviction of his own fictional conceit, and falls back upon a distracting absurdity. It is a narrative substitution cipher that Poe himself would have spurned had any reader sent it in. But there are other problems with the story. For one, it is not really a story at all—it is essentially a lecture by Dupin, occupied with puncturing one newspaper after another’s coverage of the case—a learned diatribe that comes disconcertingly close in tone to Poe’s hatchet work as a reviewer.
    If the success of “Rue Morgue” explains much about detective fiction, so does the failure of “Marie Roget.” Despite thegrisly double-murder it has as its subject, “Rue Morgue” possesses unexpected wit and warmth; its characters interact, examine the scene of the crime, and stage a narratively gratifying confrontation of the suspect’s accomplice. “Marie Roget” has none of these. Even Dupin’s unnamed sidekick is given nothing to do, save for two lines in the middle of the piece: “ ‘And what,’ I here demanded, ‘do you think of the opinions of Le Commerciel ?’ ”—and then, a couple of pages later—“ ‘And what are we to think,’ I asked, ‘of the article in Le Soleil ?’ ” Without the sidekick to act as a proxy for the reader’s own queries and puzzle-solving, the story lacks any place for the reader to engage with it.
    “The Mystery of Marie Roget” still possesses a special place in the history of literature: just