Poe and Detective Fiction
Edgar Allan Poe's Influence on Detective Fiction
While many people do not relate Edgar Allan Poe with detective fiction and is best known for his tales of the grotesque and macabre, Poe is in fact the father of modern detective fiction. Through his mystery stories, which include "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter," Poe was able to establish a framework of detective motifs that would help to define the genre and would later be applied to other works of detective fiction. Through his three detective stories, which are part of a series that feature C. Auguste Dupin as the eccentric and genius detective, Poe defined five different elements that should be present in order to construct a successful mystery story.
In order for any detective story to be successful, Poe contended that a crime had to occur. In each of Poe's stories, there is a unique crime that is perpetrated. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget," the sequel to the first story, the crime that is committed is murder, while in the third story, "The Purloined Letter," the crime is theft. It is only logical that in order for any story to be considered a mystery or detective story, then some sort of crime must occur; without an element of crime, then a story cannot be considered to be detective fiction.
The second element that must be present is that the detective fiction's storyline must make use of a detective or sleuth that has a higher degree of inductive...
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