Edgar Allen Poe
...keep its readers on the edge of their seats. When reading these certain stories, one must wonder, "What was the first detective story?" and "Who wrote it?" The off-kilter Edgar Allen Poe was the first author of a detective story. In fact, Edgar Allen Poe's detective stories, despite the harsh criticism they received, had a major influence on the forming of the detective genre and set the basic model of the detective story we know today.
How is a detective story unique and different from the average narrative? Willard Huntington Wright once explained a detective story effectively saying, "I believe the detective novel does not fall under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense, but belongs rather in the category of riddle; it is in fact, a complicated and extended puzzle cast in fictional form" (Wright 2). The detective story is in fact a puzzle, which the reader is forced to unravel. Detective stories are full of patterns. Creating patterns are what detective stories are about, Poe wanted to discover the patterns that were already there. Many of the detective story writers simply had to unravel the story themselves and put it back together for the readers to enjoy taking it back apart (May 83). Essentially, reading a detective story is like doing a cross-work puzzle.
Why did Poe write a detective story? What influenced him? Poe's obsession with the idea of scientific experimentation influenced his thirst for an analytic story. His detective stories were analytical stories. They represented the ideas and problems that fascinated him (Wright 2). After a deep analysis of Poe's detective story, one can see that Poe actually was projecting himself into the narrator. He, in fact, had some respect for Dupin, a character he created (May 92). He wanted to obviously make others feel the way he did about Dupin, thus he wrote the detective story. Poe has...
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