Preface 1 Edgar Allan Poe and the Detective Story Narrative
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Notes Preface 1. If one already exists it has escaped my exhaustive researches, and so to its author I offer an unreserved apology on two grounds: firstly for any oversight on my part and secondly, because I would dearly love to have read it! 2. Robert Champigny, What Will Have Happened (Bloomington, University of Indiana, 1977), p. 13. 3. Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 87. 4. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 3. 5. Patricia Merivale and Susan Sweeney, ‘The Game’s Afoot’, in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Modernism, ed. by Patricia Merivale and Susan Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 2. 6. For a comprehensive bibliographical survey of locked room stories, see Robert Adey, Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes: A Comprehensive Bib- liography (Minneapolis: Crossover Press, 1991). This is a well-researched and invaluable ‘bible’ to have at one’s fingertips. 1 Edgar Allan Poe and the Detective Story Narrative 1. Donald A. Yates, ‘An Essay on Locked Rooms’, in The Mystery Writer’s Art, ed. Francis M. Nevins, Jr. (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970), p. 273. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, ‘The Life of Jesus’, Three Essays, 1793–1795: The Tubingen Essay, Berne Fragments, The Life of Jesus, ed. and trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 75. 3. J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 119. 4. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), p. 328. 5. Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 24–5. 6. François Eugène Vidocq, Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime, ed. and trans. Edwin Gile Rich (Edinburgh: AK Press/Nabat, 2003). 7. Sita A. Schütt, ‘French Crime Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003), pp. 60–1. 8. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in Tales, Poems and Essays (London: Collins, 1952), p. 341. 9. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 43. 173 174 Notes 10. Ostrom, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, p. 328. 11. Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in Tales, Poems and Essays, p. 503. 12. Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, pp. 26–7. 13. Poe, ‘Charles Dickens’, in Tales, Poems and Essays, p. 533. 14. Champigny, What Will Have Happened, p. 13. 15. Merivale, ‘Gumshoe Gothics’, in Detecting Texts, p. 102. 16. Heta Pyrrhönen, Murder from an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), p. 16. 17. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in Tales, Poems and Essays, pp. 330–1. 18. Patrick Diskin, ‘Poe, Le Fanu and the Sealed Room Mystery’, Notes and Queries 13 (September 1966), 337–9. The tale referred to by Diskin is J. C. Managan, ‘The Thirty Flasks’, Dublin University Magazine xii (October 1838), 408–24. 19. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Cardboard Box’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (London: John Murray, 1956), pp. 923–6. 20. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories (London: John Murray, 1954), pp. 275–82. 21. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 335. 22. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’, in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories, ed. Douglas G. Greene and Robert C. S. Adey (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994), p. 33. 23. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, pp. 335, 340. 24. Le Fanu, ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’, pp. 33, 34. 25. Le Fanu, ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’, p. 34. 26. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 339. 27. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 336. 28. Le Fanu, ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’, p. 33. 29. See note 5. 30. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 342. 31. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 371. 32. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 346. 33. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 348. 34. Kennedy, Poe, Death and the Life of Writing, p. 115. 35. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 330. 36. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 337. 37. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 20. 38. Mark S. Madoff, ‘Inside, Outside, and the Gothic Locked-Room Mystery’, in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS, 1989), p. 50. 39. Sidney Poger and Tony Magistrale, ‘Poe’s Children: The Conjunction of the Detective and the Gothic Tale’, Clues 18.1 (1997), 141–2. 40. Geoffrey Hartmann, ‘Literature High and Low: The Case of the Mystery Story’, in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 217. 41. Joseph N. Riddel, ‘The “Crypt” of Edgar Poe’, Boundary 2 7.3 (Spring 1979), 123. 42. Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in Tales, Poems and Essays, p. 140. Notes 175 43. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Instinct vs. Reason – A Black Cat’, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. II, p. 682. 44. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 357. 45. Poe, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, in Tales, Poems and Essays, pp. 216–17. 46. Poe, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, p. 217. 47. Poe, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, p. 224. 48. J. A. Leo Lemay, ‘The Psychology of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” ’, American Literature 54 (1982), 166. 49. Jeanne M. Malloy, ‘Apocalyptic Imagery and the Fragmentation of the Psyche: “The Pit and the Pendulum” ’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 46.1 (June 1991), 94. 50. William W. Stowe, ‘Reason and Logic in Detective Fiction’, Semiotics 6, 2.3 (1987), 374–5. 51. Kevin J. Hayes, ‘One-Man Modernist’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 232. 52. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 331. 53. Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, p. 332. 2 The Locked Compartment: Charles Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’ and Enclosure in the Railway Mystery Story 1. Detailed accounts of Thomas Briggs’s murder appear in Arthur and Mary Sellwood’s The Victorian Railway Murders (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1979), pp. 11–52; H. B. Irving’s ‘The First Railway Murder’, in The Railway Murders: Ten Classic True Crime Stories, ed. Jonathan Goodman (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), pp. 13–37; John Henry Wigmore, The Principles of Judicial Proof, ed. H. B. Irving (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1913), p. 417; Elizabeth Anne Stanko, The Meanings of Violence (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 26; Ralf Roth and Marie-Noelle Polino, The City and the Railway in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), p. 249. 2. The Annual Register 1864. 3. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘The Compartment’, in The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 79. 4. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘Railroad Space and Railroad Time’, New German Critique 14 (1978), 33. 5. ‘Mugby Junction’, All The Year Round, Christmas 1866. The entire edition is given over to the Mugby Junction stories, which are, in order of their orig- inal appearance: ‘Barbox Brothers’, ‘Barbox and Co.’, ‘Main Line: The Boy at Mugby’, ‘No.1 Branch Line: The Signalman’, by Dickens; ‘No. 2 Branch Line: The Engine-Driver’, by Andrew Halliday; ‘No. 3 Branch Line: The Com- pensation House’, by Charles Collins; ‘No. 4 Branch Line: The Travelling Post-Office’, by Hesba Stretton; ‘No. 5 Branch Line: The Engineer’, by Amelia B. Edwards (repr. in Charles Dickens, Christmas Stories and Others [London: Chapman and Hall, 1891], pp. 323–64). 6. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, in Christmas Stories and Others, p. 312. 176 Notes 7. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 312–13. 8. David Seed, ‘Mystery in Everyday Things: Charles Dickens’ “The Signalman” ’, Criticism 23 (1981), 48. 9. For a description of this accident see ‘Brighton–Clayton Tunnel Accident’, The Railway Times (31 August 1861), p. 1109. 10. Norris Pope, ‘Dickens’s “The Signalman” and Information Problems in the Railway Age’, Technology and Culture 42.3 (July 2001), 442. 11. Mrs Henry Woods, ‘Going Through the Tunnel’, in A Treasury of Victorian Detective Stories, ed. Everett F. Bleiler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), pp. 173–88. 12. Ewald Mengel, ‘The Structure and Meaning of Dickens’s “The Signalman” ’, Studies in Short Fiction 20.4 (1983), 272. 13. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 314. 14. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 315. 15. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 316. 16. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 317. 17. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 318. 18. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 318. 19. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 319. 20. Dickens, ‘The Signalman’, p. 317. 21. An account of the Staplehurst crash can be found in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (London: Minerva, 1991). The general effects of the trauma of railway acci- dents in the nineteenth century are well documented in Ralph Harrington’s chapter, ‘The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma and Technological Crisis in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, ed.