It’s no secret that the crime fiction genre is wildly popular across the world. There are hundreds of award-winning television shows and movies and entire sections in bookstores dedicated to the subject. It’s not a new obsession, though. People enjoyed this genre from the moment of its conception—the 1840s. Who do we have to thank for the genre that brought us CSI, Law and Order, Longmire, Psych, and Only Murders in the Building and inspired writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie, and Stephen King? Often referred to as the Father of Detective Fiction, it’s Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe was academically gifted from a young age. At 15, he attended the University of Virginia, and at 18, he published his first book of poetry: Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The collection was not well received, and Poe spent the next decade of his life editing magazines and writing short stories and poetry. From 1838-1841, Poe wrote some of the most impactful pieces of literature in history, including “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” These stories are some of the pioneering works in the field of psychological horror.
In 1841, Poe published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a short story about a grisly double murder that baffles police but is solved by amateur detective Auguste Dupin. The story was immediately popular and introduced tropes seen in crime fiction since, including the inept police, the sidekick narrator, and the final act revealing the perpetrator of the crime and then walking through the detective’s process of reasoning. Poe called the story a tale of “ratiocination,” which is defined as an extremely deliberate process of reasoning through a problem, something used widely in crime fiction to this day. Arthur Conan Doyle referenced Dupin and his process of crime solving as the inspiration for his character Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the most famous fictional detective of all time. Poe went on to write two more stories featuring Dupin, one based on a crime that had actually taken place. It looks like we have to credit Poe with the advent of true crime as well. Poe’s detective stories were immediately popular, but certainly their legacy is their true success.
Learn more here:
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edgar-allan-poe
- https://poemuseum.org/poe-biography/
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edgar-Allan-Poe/Legacy
- https://www.britannica.com/art/detective-story-narrative-genre
- https://daily.jstor.org/bloody-history-of-true-crime-genre/
