Thursday, April 15, 2021

And Edgar created europulp


April 1841, 180 years ago: in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: on The Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders of the Rue Morgue is published for the first time. Detective story was born, and much more.

Some say the first mystery story ever is the Abel murder case in the Bible. But - as my friend A. G. Pinketts once put it - since Adam and Eve were supporting each other's alibi, only one suspect was left and you didn't need to be all-knowing to find the murderer.
Of course murders and detection are present in plays from Sophocles (think about Oedipus Rex) to Shakespeare, though sometimes with supernatural elements. There was something similar to detective stories in XVIII and early XIX centuries.
But Poe created the first detective. Moreover, one with an assistant-biographer whose identity is not specified: it might even be Poe himself, if he had ever been in Paris.
This useful technique helps the reader: since the detective is too smart to be immediately understood, the assistant-biographer poses him inside the story the same questions the reader would pose.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will repeat the scheme with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Agatha Christie will use it too: Hercule Poirot has several narrators and assistants in his cases and in a book of hers she brilliantly takes advantage of the cliché. Rex Stout will find another original way: the classic whodunit-style detective Nero Wolfe's assistant-narrator is the modern harboiled detective Archie Goodwin.

At the same time Poe invents the nameless narrator, which will be used by Dashiell Hammett in his Continental Op stories, by Len Deighton with the anonymous secret agent in his first spy novels (later named Harry Palmer in the movies) and by Bill Pronzini with his Nameless Detective series.
Hardboiled detectives are not so smart as their whodunit-style colleagues, so they can explain themselves to readers with no go-between, but they don't need to tell you their real name. (Oh, I used this trick too in my BookHunter series.)
Moreover, since Hammett's Continental Op novel Red Harvest inspired both Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo (where Toshiro Mifune plays a nameless samurai) and Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, we might even say that Poe's story is somehow the distant origin of Clint Eastwood's western icon of the "nameless stranger".


It's not just that. The Murders of the Rue Morgue is the first time in literature that professional policemen, baffled by a mystery they cannot solve, call for the help of an amateur sleuth, in this case chevalier Auguste Dupin. They'll do it again in two more Dupin stories, The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter. (It's a pity such an important character appeared so briefly; that's why my friend Rino Casazza and I wrote (in Italian) a few more stories about an old-age Dupin, having him challenge Sherlock Holmes and face a criminal resembling Allain & Souvestre's Fantômas).
The stories are set in Paris and there's a reson why the police needs external help: in the real world, the Sûrété had been created only about thirty years before and originally led by former criminal and snitch Eugène-François Vidocq, who after all, would be a good cop: set a thief to catch a thief, as they say. But you wouldn't expect such a police force to solve sophisticated mysteries.
Since then all famous literary amateur detectives were asked to help the police. This doesn't happen in real life, of course. The need for a more realistic approach led to hardboiled detective stories, to police stories (featuring inspectors or "precincts", where law enforcement was no longer incompetent) and even to crime stories from an outlaw's point of view.
But having his detective investigating in Paris turned out to be useful when Poe based his second Dupin story on a real case, the murder of Mary Rogers in New York. In The Mystery of Marie Roget, the writer was able to criticize police work by investigating the real crime in a fictionalized version... and reaching a solution that was very similar to the real one, before the police did. Detective stories got mixed with true crime.
Dupin's undisputable logic is surprising, considering that Poe was the master of nightmare and irrational (and, after all, the first story has a bit of horror in it). But it's twice as surprising if we consider Dupin's postmodern methods: the detective is not just investigating the case, but also the failure of the previous investigation by the police. He looks where the cops - being cops - haven't been looking. From this angle, Dupin appears much more advanced than Holmes.
And it all started in Rue Morgue.


Finally, I would say that Poe, by setting his stories in Europe, invented "europulp". Paris was an exotic location for American readers in 1841, as much as the unnamed Italian town in The Masque of the Red Death, published in May 1842 on the same magazine. Europe was already the perfect continent to set a gothic story, but for the first time it was used for a crime story. Only in June 1842 Eugène Sue would start publishing his Les mystères de Paris, influenced by Vidocq's memoirs but also by American popular literature.
European and American fiction went on influencing each other since then: from Poe's detective to British detectives and back to American detectives; from French feuilleton to American pulp magazines; from US hardboiled to French noir and US western to spaghetti western which in return would influence US western in the 70's; and US crime movies in the 70's inspiring the poliziottesco movies in Italy... Even before globalization, the mutual exploitation of genres was a continous source of inspiration.
Take the Hayes code in the US: the old Hollywood rules did not allow a caper to end with robbers happily enjoying their loot, unlike Fantômas in Paris. But in 1953 Paris writers Auguste Le Breton, with the novel Rififi, and Albert Simonin, with the novel Touchez pas au grisbi, both chose creatively to use the rules of Hollywood movies for the ending of their crime stories, which were filmed succesfully the following year.
The first mystery writer to play on both sides of the Atlantic was Poe.
So, 180 years ago, while creating the first modern detective story, Edgar also unknowingly invented what I call "europulp".



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This blog is about popular fiction from a European-Mediterranean point of view. I witnessed its evolution, mostly in Italy but also in Spain...

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