Edgar Allen Poe - by Michael E. Grost

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Edgar Allan Poe

Tales

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842)
The Spectacles (1844)
The Oblong Box (1844)
The Purloined Letter (1844)
The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether (1844)
Thou Art The Man (1844)

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe's mystery and science fiction are underacknowledged by realist literary critics. Poe was a pioneer in both genres, and together they constitute, in bulk, half of his short tales. However, the favorite Poe works among realists include "Ligeia", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "William Wilson". These are the Poe works that are closest to conventional realistic fiction: there is an emphasis in these works on psychological portraiture, and the study of human relationships. This is quite common, to emphasize those works in an author's canon that correspond to the conventions of conventional literary thought, and ignore the rest. There is no mystery in these works, and the fantasy, where it exists, is strictly supernatural, with no scientific overtones.

The Mysteries

By contrast, the sheer amount of mystery and science fiction Poe wrote is usually not acknowledged. Poe's mysteries include not only "The Gold-Bug" and the three Dupin tales, but also, "Thou Art The Man" and "The Oblong Box". In addition, both "The Spectacles", and "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" share much of the form of mystery tales, with surprise solutions hinted at through clues in the stories, and many scenes and incidents having two meanings, one surface, one hidden and revealed at the end, even though neither has a detective or an explicit puzzle to solve. "Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" could be a formal model for Melville's mystery tale "Benito Cereno", although I know of no explicit evidence that Melville actually read Poe's tale.

Most of Poe's mystery stories were written during a relatively short period, 1841 - 1844. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is the most important of Poe's mystery works. It is the first, and the one that set the form of not only Poe's other stories, but of all subsequent mystery fiction.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" seems like a direct ancestor of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales. The relationship of Holmes and Watson seems similar to that of Dupin and the narrator. They meet and move in with each other, just as in A Study in Scarlet. And the narrator deeply admires Dupin, just like Watson and Holmes. The storytelling style also seems close to Doyle. The way in which Dupin announces he has a visitor coming, whom they must capture to solve the mystery, is very close to Doyle's climaxes. The emphasis on Dupin's intellect, and the use of reasoning and deduction to solve the mystery, anticipate both Doyle and detective fiction as a whole. Dupin's explanations of how he solved the case seem very similar to those of Holmes.

The Science Fiction

Poe's major contributions to the sf field include:

"Hans Pfaal", one of the first scientifically serious tales of space flight,
"The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion", the first end of the world story,
"The Colloquy of Monos and Una", a tale of survival after death;
Two cosmological tales, "The Power of Words" and "Mesmeric Revelation".
"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains", perhaps the first tale of physical time travel,
"Mellonta Tauta", the first depiction in fiction of a complex future society radically different from our own. The future depicted in "Mellonta Tauta" is not Utopian, like most earlier future tales, such as "L'An 2440" of Mercier, or disastrous, like Mary Shelley's "The Last Man", but simply very different. It incorporates many scientific advances, and social and historical changes, from the society of the present day.
Poe's essay on "Maelzel's Chess Player" contains interesting ideas on automata, and perhaps influenced later writings on robots and computers.
Poe's several tales of balloon and sea travel approach the borderline of science fiction, dealing plausibly with scenes that were fantastic, or beyond the bounds of everyday reality.

Poe's emphasis on scientific plausibility in "Hans Pfaal", and elsewhere, influenced not just the treatment of space travel, but all of science fiction. In many ways he is one of the main architects of sf as a genre. Despite the contributions of Lucian of Samos, Sir Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Peter Wilkins, Ludwig Holberg, Jonathan Swift, Mercier, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Mary Shelley, Poe's works often read like the first real crystallization of sf in the form we know it today. Poe took a genre dominated by fantastic voyages, Utopias, sleepers into the future (Mercier, Washington Irving) and gothic scientific experimenters (Hoffmann, Godwin, Shelley & Hawthorne), and turned it into modern sf.

With the Night Mail and Cordwainer Smith

Poe's influence can be seen on several later writers. Kipling's tale of a strange future world, "With the Night Mail" (1905), could have been inspired by "Mellonta Tauta". The giant balloons that dominate each story, and the replacement of democracy by autocracy are features in common. So is the wonderful air of "strangeness", the visiting of a future so different in many ways from the present. The strange "sound and light shows" of the storms in Kipling could have been inspired by the storm encountered by the balloon in "Hans Pfaal". (There is a similar storm in "The Fall of the House of Usher". The two storms are among Poe's best episodes.)

Algis Budrys thinks that "With the Night Mail" possibly inspired Cordwainer Smith's tales of a very strange future. "Mellonta Tauta" also has a Smithian feel. If Borges were to write a "Precursors to Cordwainer Smith", as he did for Kafka, both "Mellonta Tauta" and "With the Night Mail" would figure prominently. Smith's works are among the masterpieces of modern sf, especially his short stories and novellas.

Other SF Influences

Jules Verne's tales of "Extraordinary Voyages" were greatly inspired by Poe, as he himself acknowledged. The sort of scientifically plausible space travel of "Hans Pfall" and balloon flight in "The Balloon Hoax" are clearly the models for Verne.

Edward Page Mitchell's works also seem very Poe inspired, even Poe derived. His remarkable tales of Automata, "The Ablest Man in the World" and "The Tachypomp", seem to be just a single step beyond "Maelzel's Chess Player". The Time Travel in "The Clock That Went Backwards" seems to be in the same mode as Poe's in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains". In neither works by Poe or Mitchell, do the time travel stories add up to a logically consistent picture, by the standards of modern science fiction. In both, people from the present go back in time and turn into, or somehow coincide with, people from the past. These stories show a great deal of imagination, but they are not the sort of logically consistent time travel tale found in modern sf, apparently initiated by H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" (1895).

The fantastic tales of Fitz James O'Brien

O'Brien's tales are clearly inspired by Poe's. What is most surprising about them are their numerous cultural references. O'Brien is a writer, like Poe, Melville, E. M. Forster, Borges and Ballard, who adds many cultural allusions to his work. In all of these writers, these references are not mere window dressing, but part of the development of the ideas, plot and characters of the story. In J.G. Ballard's words, we are all living inside a gigantic novel, surrounded by fictions of every kind. These fictions form far more of our reality and environment than do mere physical surroundings, or even social institutions. O'Brien's allusions show great cultural sophistication, and contact with advanced currents of his era. They surprised me in an author who is often discussed in histories of fantastic fiction as a purveyor of mild horror effects.

M.S. Found in a Bottle - and Harriet Prescott Spofford

Harriet Prescott Spofford's story, "The Moonstone Mass", could have been inspired by Poe's "M.S. Found in a Bottle". Both tales deal with conditions at the Poles, at a time when little was known scientifically about this region of the Earth. Spofford's geography, with revolving currents, passageways and amphitheaters, also seems Poe inspired.

Poe's "Hans Pfaal" echoes the ideas he had about the Antarctic in "M.S. Found in a Bottle".

"M.S. Found in a Bottle" is remarkably dream like, especially in such details as the men who do not see the protagonist as he walks among them (the sort of event that often occurs in dreams), the ship that grows larger, and the final geography of the end. This story is one of the more genuinely dream like works in literature, and makes one wonder if it had its origins in an actual dream. In any case, the logic of the story, the way it makes "sense" even though it has so many unexplained elements, reminds one of dreams.

The geography, with its long passage through a narrow chamber, and final entry into a circular amphitheater, will be repeated in Poe's great landscape tales, "The Domain of Arnheim" and "Landor's Cottage". What does it symbolize: birth? a return to the womb? sex? something very different from these, perhaps some sort of archetypal pattern or geographic dream?

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges' stories "Funes the Memorious" and "The Zahir" also reflect Poe's "Berenice", and the mental condition of its protagonist inspired those of Borges'.

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft always referred to his horror fiction as his "Poe stories", and wrote them in conscious imitation of Poe. The Poe story that most closely resembles Lovecraft's works in technique is "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar". Elements in common include the "popular" murmurings at the beginnings; the mysterious allusions to as yet unnamed horrors; the reference to "the facts as I understand them"; the dry, precise "scientific" tone throughout; the somewhat laborious descriptions, as if in a scientific document; explicit self referential mentioning of when the story crosses the line into unknown scientific frontiers; the revelation two thirds through the story of a hair raising situation of the scientific unknown; and the slow, deliberate, conscious build up to a final image of total horror, constructed like a climax in music.