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Updated: June 14, 2025
Probably also he felt the detective-story to be an inferior form. However superior his stories in this kind might be, he knew them to be unworthy of comparison with his more imaginative tales, which he had filled with a thrilling weirdness and which attained a soaring elevation far above any height to be achieved by ingenious narratives setting forth the solving of a puzzle.
The detective-story which Poe invented sharply differentiates itself from the earlier tales of mystery, and also from the later narratives in which actual detectives figure incidentally. Perhaps the first of these tales of mystery is Walpole's 'Castle of Otranto, which appears to us now clumsy enough, with its puerile attempts to excite terror. The romances of Mrs.
For the secret of the thinness and also of the intensity of the detective-story is that the writer is left with only one quality, that of intellectual acuteness, with which to endow his hero. Everything else is outside the picture and weakens the effect. The problem and its solution must form the theme, and the character drawing is limited and subordinate.
Why should he confine his entire relations with me in twenty-four years to two preposterous detective-story letters?" Sharlee said nothing. To tell the truth, she thought the behavior of Queed Senior puzzling in the last degree. "You grasp the situation? He knows exactly where I am; evidently he has known it all along.
He knew the girl, but he did not know and could not imagine what purpose she had in aiding Fitzgerald to win his wager or luring him out to an obscure village in this detective-story manner. "Well, I shall hear all about it from her father," he concluded. And all in good time he did. It was a little station made gloomy by a single light. Once in so often a fast train stopped, if properly flagged.
Consider all these; and we are forced to the conclusion that if the writing of a good detective-story is so rare and so difficult, if only one of Poe's imitators has been able really to rival his achievement, if this single success has been the result of an acceptance of Poe's formula and of a close adherence to Poe's practise, then, what Poe wrought is really unique; and we must give him the guerdon of praise due to an artist who has accomplished the first time of trying that which others have failed to achieve even after he had shown them how.
As a love-story, it is charming; as a sea- and shipwreck- and treasure-finding-story, it offers a fair challenge not only to Russell, but to Stevenson himself; while as a detective-story it is as good as most.
Before a crime such as this we seem to find ourselves peering into the contorted visage of primitive man, obeying no law but his own caprice. The superiority of the poet who wrote the first detective-story over all those who have striven to tread in the trail he blazed is obvious enough.
Finally, it will be remembered the "stationary waiter" left the room, casting a glance which indicated "let it be understood that all emoluments are mine, and that Nil is the reward of this slave." Still, Dickens wrote the book as a detective story; he wrote it as The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And alone, perhaps, among detective-story writers, he never lived to destroy his mystery.
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