by Paul Collins
As in his earliest works, here Poe lacks the conviction of his own fictional conceit, and falls back upon a distracting absurdity. It is a narrative substitution cipher that Poe himself would have spurned had any reader sent it in. But there are other problems with the story. For one, it is not really a story at all—it is essentially a lecture by Dupin, occupied with puncturing one newspaper after another’s coverage of the case—a learned diatribe that comes disconcertingly close in tone to Poe’s hatchet work as a reviewer.
If the success of “Rue Morgue” explains much about detective fiction, so does the failure of “Marie Roget.” Despite the grisly double-murder it has as its subject, “Rue Morgue” possesses unexpected wit and warmth; its characters interact, examine the scene of the crime, and stage a narratively gratifying confrontation of the suspect’s accomplice. “Marie Roget” has none of these. Even Dupin’s unnamed sidekick is given nothing to do, save for two lines in the middle of the piece: “ ‘And what,’ I here demanded, ‘do you think of the opinions of Le Commerciel?’ ”—and then, a couple of pages later—“ ‘And what are we to think,’ I asked, ‘of the article in Le Soleil?’ ” Without the sidekick to act as a proxy for the reader’s own queries and puzzle-solving, the story lacks any place for the reader to engage with it.
“The Mystery of Marie Roget” still possesses a special place in the history of literature: just as “Rue Morgue” marked the creation of the first modern detective in fiction, so this begins the first detective series. But the Dr. Watsons of the world might take comfort in knowing that even Edgar Allan Poe found that without a sidekick, there is only a detective—but no detective story.
Among all the vagaries of Poe’s career, he had always had the safety of his modest home, and Virginia and his aunt Maria to depend on. As his wife sang at their parlor piano in early 1842, though, she suddenly began coughing up bright red splotches. The highly oxygenated blood from Virginia’s lungs was an unmistakable, terrible sign—the dramatic, frightening onset of tuberculosis.
“My dear little wife has been dangerously ill,” Poe wrote to a friend. “About a fortnight since, in singing, she ruptured a blood-vessel, and it was only yesterday that the physicians gave me any hope of her recovery. You might imagine the agony I have suffered, for you know how devotedly I love her.”
In April 1842 Poe turned in an unsettling personal allegory of a castle’s devastation by a bloody plague—“The Masque of the Red Death”—and then quit his job at Graham’s. He put a brave face on it at first, chasing the shimmering mirage of Penn once again, and scoffing of Graham’s that “my reason for resigning was disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine . . . the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love-tales.” To an old hometown friend, though, he quietly gave a different story: his ability to concentrate, he explained, was shattered by “the renewed and hopeless illness of my wife.” By midsummer of 1842, scarcely ten weeks after quitting Graham’s, Poe contemplated bankruptcy—for the country’s first modern law had gone into effect just a few months earlier, and creditors were already frantically lobbying to overturn it. Instead of leaping through this brief window of debt amnesty, Poe began to drink again; by one account, he disappeared altogether for several days and was found in the wilds outside Jersey City, “wandering around like a crazy man.” His drinking was not a new problem, but it was now greatly deepened by Virginia’s illness.
“Her life was despaired of,” he explained later. “I took leave of her forever & underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially and again I hoped. Then again—again—again & even once again at varying intervals. . . . I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of consciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much.”
Brought back home, he sobered up only to find himself more broke than ever. “I am desperately pushed for money,” he wrote to a publisher.
From this desperation came a great potboiler—a Blackwood’s story to top all Blackwood’s stories. Poe could mock sensational “predicament” stories—“Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations—they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet,” he once wrote—but he knew they sold readily, and he had a magnificent one in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” A bravura technical performance, it plays out in a dark dungeon of the Spanish Inquisition, where tortures multiply absurdly (starvation, thirst, rats, fire, moving walls, dismemberment) as the narrator largely senses the danger about him—the hissing of a pendulum blade over his body, “the odor of the sharp steel” as it approaches his face, the taste of spiced food given to him without water, the sensation of heat through his fingers as fires behind the metal walls of his prison are stoked.
It was well that he sold the story: his other great piece of fiction that season, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” led a cursed existence. It is the most ideal work of Poe’s art. It lacks any time or place, or indeed any thing save for a bed, a pillow, a lantern, floorboards, and a victim—the barest elements of murder. The victim gets scarcely two words in (“Who’s there ?”) and the arresting officers none, for we are trapped in the first-person present-tense narration of an insane, monumentally self-regarding man who claims he is absolutely sane . . . even as the guilt of his crime begins to blot out his senses.
It is an unnerving mimicry of madness that resonates in any time or place—any, at least, save Boston in 1842. “The Tell-Tale Heart” was coldly rejected by the editor of Boston Miscellany, who sniffed that he might buy something “if Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles.” This was the bitter fruit of Poe’s reviewing: a year earlier he had publicly dismissed the same editor’s work as “insufferably tedious and dull.” Instead, he sold the piece for the launch of a new magazine, Pioneer. “The Tell-Tale Heart” took pride of place in the magazine’s first issue, but went unpaid, as Pioneer collapsed almost immediately after its publisher, James Russell Lowell, fell ill.
Poe, uncharacteristically, did not insist on getting paid. “As for the few dollars you owe me . . . I may be poor, but must be very much poorer, indeed, when I even think of demanding them,” he assured Lowell. For in Lowell he could see his own plight: a frightening portent, as Poe struggled to start Penn amid his own wife’s illness. He renamed his effort The Stylus and wrote another prospectus, but what Poe needed now was not another magazine, but the kind of steady life that writing could not give him.
What he needed, in short, was a desk job. His mind turned to a friend’s letter from the year before.
“How would you like,” fellow writer Frederick W. Thomas had corresponded from Washington, D.C., “to be an office-holder here at $1,500 per year payable monthly by Uncle Sam who, however slack he may be to his general creditors, pays his officials with due punctuality. How would you like it ? You stroll to your office a little after nine in the morning leisurely, and you stroll from it a little after two in the afternoon homeward to dinner, and return no more that day.”
Poe liked it very much indeed: a patronage job as a clerk would pay twice what he earned at Graham’s and sounded like an artist’s idyll. Thomas was a friend of President Tyler’s son and might be able to swing Edgar a Customs House job. And so it was on March 8, 1843, that Edgar Allan Poe left Philadelphia with all the nervous hope of an interviewee seeking a new job.
But when Poe got nervous, he drank.
The trouble began soon after he arrived at his hotel. Thomas was sick. Even worse, some twelve hundred applications had poured in for jobs at the Customs House. Left largely to his own devices in a strange city, Poe began to unravel.
“On the first evening he seemed somewhat excited, having been persuaded to take some Port-wine,” wrote one friend. Although Poe stayed sober the next day, he soon began drinking again, woozily wearing his cloak inside-out and insulting Thomas and other potential allies—including, in one case, committing the grave error of making fun of an editor’s moustache. An acquaintance, chancing upon him in the
street in Washington, recalled that he was “seedy in appearance and woe-begone. . . . He said he had not had a mouthful to eat since the day previous, and begged me to lend him fifty cents to obtain a meal.”
Another friend of Poe’s, Jesse Dow, had now seen quite enough.
“I think it advisable for you to come and safely see him back to his home,” Dow wrote to a publisher in Philadelphia. “Mrs. Poe is in a bad state of health, and I charge you, as you have a soul to be saved, not to say a word to her about him until he arrives with you.”
Returning home to Philadelphia sick with regret, Poe wrote embarrassed letters of apology—“Don’t say a word about the cloak turned inside out, or other peccadilloes of that nature . . . Forgive my petulance and don’t believe I think all I said.” If he got a clerkship, Poe promised, he would join a temperance society, and joked that “it would be a feather in Mr. Tyler’s cap to save from the perils of mint julap—& ‘Port wines’—a young man of whom all the world thinks so well & who thinks so remarkably well of himself.”
Instead, he kept drinking. His partner for The Stylus withdrew his support, and Poe moved his family into more cramped quarters downtown, where a kindly landlord let the rent slide. His aunt Maria made valiant efforts to keep the house tidy and cheerfully planted beds of flowers outside, but Poe continued to toil in obscurity.
“To his neighbors his name meant very little,” one local recalled years later, after he’d become famous. “Then, we felt sorry that we had not taken notice of him.” But there had been little to take notice of back then, she admitted; Poe was simply a careworn-looking man, always with a grave expression on his face: “He, his wife, and Mrs. Clemm kept to themselves. They had the reputation of being very reserved—we thought because of their poverty and his great want of success.”
Poe was at his lowest ebb since a decade earlier when he was disinherited from John Allan’s estate. And now, as then, his salvation would come when he opened a local newspaper to discover a contest announcement.
VERY LIBERAL OFFERS, it read, AND NO HUMBUG.
The Dollar Newspaper, at first glance, was not a publication to impress someone who found Graham’s to be “too nambypamby.” Just launched in Philadelphia as a “weekly family journal,” it combined a carnival barker’s come-on—it was for “the Farmer, the Mechanic, the Merchant, the Laborer, and Professional Man. . . . the man of business and the man of leisure, the matron and the maid. . . . the STATESMAN, the man of SCIENCE, and the POLITICIAN”—with the rather less lofty promise of “remarkable cheapness.” Yet the publication was indeed thriving, and Poe was wise to submit a story to their competition, for the June 14, 1843, issue proudly announced that they had “awarded the first prize of ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS to ‘THE GOLD BUG’ . . . written by Edgar Allan Poe, Esq., of this city—and a capital story the committee pronounce it to be.”
It was a fitting choice. Rather like the Dollar Newspaper itself, “The Gold-Bug” is a crowd-pleaser. The tale of an eccentric South Carolina gentleman who discovers Captain Kidd’s buried treasure, it had something for everyone: a pirate story complete with skulls and a treasure chest, an invisible ink cipher, a riddle and a rebus thrown in for good measure, and low racial comedy from a slave who cannot tell his left hand from his right.
Just a few months earlier Poe had complained to a friend, “I have lost, in time, which to me is money, more than a thousand dollars in solving ciphers.” But in “The Gold-Bug,” the puzzle-solving paid off—for the story centers around a frequency-analysis decryption worthy of one of his Alexander’s Weekly Messenger columns, and indeed very nearly places some of Poe’s own musings as a columnist into the mouths of his characters. Poe’s real stroke of genius, adding pirates to a puzzle challenge, may have been inspired by a brief flare of interest in Captain Kidd the year before, after an absurd news story circulated of a woman trying to lay legal claim upon Kidd’s treasure by claiming to be his sister. “If this lady really is a sister of Captain Kidd,” one newspaper mused, “she must be rather advanced in life by this time, inasmuch as her hopeful brother was duly and properly hanged one hundred and forty-one years ago.”
“The Gold-Bug” proved a veritable Kidd’s treasure chest itself: within a week of the prize announcement, headlines reported “A GREAT RUSH FOR THE PRIZE STORY!” The Dollar Newspaper scrambled to copyright the piece and quickly ran second and third printings. The story’s fame only increased when, after one columnist pronounced it “a decided humbug,” Poe frivolously threatened to take him to court. The suit never came to pass, but over the next six weeks nearly every other kind of grandstanding did. There was a quick Graham’s pamphlet cash-in titled “The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, Volume 1”—they never got around to a Volume 2—a hastily mounted stage version by Philadelphia’s American Theatre, and a Baltimore store advertising “Gold Bug” lottery tickets, claiming they had a winner who netted a small fortune after dreaming about Poe’s story.
By Poe’s own estimate, the Dollar Newspaper and pirated reprints put 300,000 copies of “The Gold-Bug” into circulation, though the unauthorized reprints did nothing to help Poe’s finances. By September, he was reduced to asking the impoverished James Lowell to pay for “The Tell-Tale Heart”—an extremity he’d almost promised not to resort to. He’d already skillfully salvaged the story for a new publication a couple of weeks earlier of “The Black Cat,” which reprises the insane first-person narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” into a similarly plotted tale of domestic murder. But even that publication, and the five dollars Lowell scraped together to send to Poe, wasn’t nearly enough. Poe would have to turn the success of “The Gold-Bug” toward a new and desperately needed source of income: lecturing.
Education had been changing in the fifteen years since Poe had left the University of Virginia, most notably in the rise of the lyceum movement, an informal circuit of lecture halls that hosted educational lectures by traveling writers and scholars. In an era where college education remained scarce, it was a way for Americans to join intellectual discussions of the day—and, organizers hoped, to keep them out of taverns. One can only guess at Poe’s thoughts when he found himself booked into such venues as Temperance Hall; nonetheless, he took to it with gusto, debuting in Philadelphia that November as a speaker on the subject of American poetry. Criticism was a subject he never tired of, after all, even if the advertisements described him as “author of the Gold-Bug, &c.” To Poe, that “&c.” was above all poetry, and concomitantly the thrashing of bad poetry.
“With the exception of some occasional severity, which however merited, may have appeared too personal, the lecture gave general satisfaction,” a Philadelphia newspaper reported that weekend, noting that Poe had particular scorn for logrolling praise by critics for each other’s work. “Mr. P laid bare its system of almost universal and indiscriminate eulogy, bestowed alike upon anything and everything—‘from the most elaborate quarto of Noah Webster, down to a penny edition of Tom Thumb.’ ”
Poe successfully repeated the lecture in other cities, but by the spring of 1844, he’d cycled through many nearby mid-Atlantic venues; going further would take him far from his aunt and his ailing wife, and his disastrous lost week in Washington had already shown him how dangerous that was. Instead, that spring saw Poe revealing to editors what would be the most polished of his detective stories: “The Purloined Letter.”
After the creative landmark of “Rue Morgue” and the unexpected dead end of “Marie Roget,” Poe’s latest story represented a perfecting of the form—a demonstration that the detective story was not only repeatable, but wonderfully adaptable. In telling the story of a devious government minister who hides a stolen document, Poe finally mastered the characters around his protagonist of Dupin. Here the police prefect so airily dismissed in “Rue Morgue” becomes that sturdy archetype of the detective genre: the by-the-book police chief. The sidekick, though still unnamed, is at long last given real dialogue—including a questioning of the visiting prefect that show
s Dupin and his sidekick developing the easy rapport of a true detective duo:
“Proceed,” said I.
“Or not,” said Dupin.
Poe had learned much from the failed plotting of “Marie Roget” and the successful characterizations of “The Gold-Bug”; now the entire story leads inexorably to the ending, and Dupin only lectures through some of it—after the prefect and the sidekick have appeared in scene with him. Poe himself was aware of just what he had achieved. Writing to James Lowell soon afterwards, he admitted that “ ‘The Purloined Letter,’ forthcoming in The Gift, is, perhaps, the best of my tales of ratiocination.”
For what Poe terms ratiocination—that is, deductive analysis and puzzle-solving—does indeed remain at the center of “The Purloined Letter.” For those who had simply associated Poe’s stories with sensational gore and insanity, this was a key revelation. While it was true that “Rue Morgue” featured a double-murder with a victim nearly shoved straight up a chimney, that was not an essential feature of the story. There is no direct violence at all in “The Purloined Letter”—nothing but the faint threat of it, perhaps, and the distraction of a blank pistol fired outside. The action of the story, such as it is, involves shuffling a couple of pieces of paper.
Dupin’s deductive process—which, as in “Rue Morgue,” the story compares at length to puzzles and gameplay—proves to be one of the most simple and powerful motives in fiction. That motive, curiously, has very little to do with violence or sensation at all. It is the bringing of order to disorder, and causality to the seemingly inexplicable. This is why, whether it features a mere document or a ghastly corpse, mystery readers ever since have associated the genre’s classic form with a curious sort of comfort; it is the same satisfaction as in solving a crossword.
Had Poe never written another line, his place in history would still be assured. With “The Purloined Letter,” he had demonstrated that the detective story was no fluke, but a wondrously flexible and compelling mode of storytelling—a genre that could grow into one of the most popular forms of literature in the world. And like many authors at the height of their powers, Poe saw where his path would inevitably lead next: New York City.
