The Characteristics Of Edgar Allan Poe's Creative Story

While Edgar Allan Poe is known primarily for his horror stories and gothic poems, he is also generally credited for the creation of modern detective fiction. In the three short stories featuring the Frenchman, C. Auguste Dupin, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” Poe’s creative story components were innovative and added entirely new elements to fiction writing. Many of the story features that he devised are now widely used in other well-known fictional detective tales, says critic E.F. Bleiter, “Poe not only improved on such elements as he borrowed, but with his remarkable structural sense worked out a viable form that served as a model for thousands of successors.” His Dupin stories …show more content…
According to Dawn Sova, a Poe biographer, “he is credited with inventing the modern detective story with an investigator who uses reasoning instead of legwork to solve crimes” (ix). Dupin dazzles the reader with his ratiocination skills (the process of logical reasoning) when he solves the crime in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” from simple interpretation of newspaper articles. Outlining the particulars of the crime scene without ever leaving his library, Dupin assures the narrator that his hypothetical solution is the only possible one. In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin applies logic to discover the letter by putting himself into the mind of the criminal, a man known to him both as a poet and as a mathematician, who is thus able to “reason well” the hiding place that the Prefect would not be capable of finding (Poe 602). In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin’s use of observation at the crime scene and newspaper accounts of the witness statements reveals the startling identity of the perpetrator, an Ourang-Outang …show more content…
The police, presented as bumbling and inept as a foil to the detective, are incapable of solving the crime, according to Dupin: “there is no method in their proceedings, beyond the method of the moment” (Poe “Murder” 326). Dupin does not believe the police to be capable of solving them and while he acknowledges that the Parisian police are full of acumen and “exceeding able, in their way,” he discounts them as dull and incompetent and their findings inconsequential to his eventual solutions (Poe “Purloined” 600). He is, at all times, much more astute and clever, contrasting his own intuition with that of the Prefect and his police forces, and as a result, establishing the element’s