One week of classes left! This class has gone so well-- so many things came together; learning and entertainment meshed beautifully. That being said we are on to class notes and links for week seven: Poe and the mystery genre; our reading was The Murders in the Rue Morgue. I forgot to snap a picture of the white board and the time line I used, so we start with my typed version.
- 1829, Sir Robert Peele and his 'bobbies'; the first organized police force
- 1837-1839, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
- 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue
- 1852-1853, Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- 1868, Wilkie Collins writes The Moonstone
- 1887, Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet; the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories to be published
- 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie's first novel and first Hercule Poirot story
*Industrial Revolution: 1750-1840
*Victorian Era, 1837-1901
*Edwardian Era, 1901-1910
This small timeline may seem odd, but there is a direct correlation between the rise of the mystery genre and the rise of crime at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian Era. Three results of the Industrial Revolution are 1) more people were living in cities in overcrowded, squalid conditions, 2) disease was rampant-- cholera, typhoid, typhus, etc., and 3) employment was uncertain and working conditions were unsafe and dismal. The masses were poor and desperate, living and surviving in close quarters. This video is rather long, but the first twelve minutes discuss the rise of crime in Victorian England, the need for a police force, and the early days of forensic science. The last part of the video goes off on a tangent about locks and locksmithing.
Novels of the day responded directly to the social upheaval, like Charles Dickens with his Oliver Twist and Bleak House. Poe was the first author to write a murder mystery, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, with the basic tropes of the genre: the eccentric, yet brilliant detective, the bumbling police authorities, first person narrative from someone other than the main character, and the inspector announces the solution followed by the reasoning leading to it. At the time, the word 'detective' did not exist. Later writings in the genre would expand on the tropes. The 'red herring' or false trail could be attributed to Poe's character M. Le Bron in Rue Morgue, but this was not utilized more obviously until later. Poe called his three mystery stores (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letters) 'tales of ratiocination'. According to dictionary.com, ratiocination is 'reasoning, conscious deliberate interference; the activity or process of reasoning; thought or reasoning that is exact; valid and rational; a proposition arrived at by such thought. Dupin, the protagonist of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, investigated primarily for his own amusement and to prove the falsely accused innocent. The character Dupin became the prototype for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. As an aside, The Murders in the Rue Morgue is also the first 'locked room' mystery, where the the murders happen within a room that's been locked from the inside.
For the pop culture portion of this class, not a whole lot has been used directly from The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Several movies for film and television have used the name, but have widely ignored the contents of the story, beginning in 1932 with a Bela Lugosi film and up to a 1986 version, starring George C. Scott and Val Kilmer. In 2004, Dark Horse Comics released a one-shot Van Helsing story using a murder scene from The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
This video, Mystery: The Symbiotic Storyline, discusses the mystery genre, how it came to be and how it has grown and morphed with other genres. As we are dealing with the mystery genre, read murder mystery, and this is a Poe class in particular, there are some seconds within this video that show murder (of course it's Hollywood) taking place.
The reading for this last week of class is The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter.
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