Fellow Harvey writer, Doctor who cosplayer, and supplier of sweets to small children Ben Sawyer has defiantly not taken any inspiration form Robert W Chambers for his next novel… Which I am looking forward to immensely, and will be out at Halloween…
If you have never heard of Robert W Chambers and don’t understand the reference I am not entirely sure why you are reading my blog, you have clearly never read it before, but hello and welcome we always like a new face/willing sacrifice around here. Or unwilling ones come to that… Anything that will keep Hastur at bay a little longer.
There are readers who, for reasons I have never truly understood, consider The DeVince Code to be a work of great fiction. To which I can only say this… ‘APPLE’, I mean come on, aside from the ‘shadowy’ villain of the piece been introduced around page 100, wearing a big sign saying ‘I am the shadowy villain” ‘ only to be revealed, to no ones shock, as the shadowy villain 300 pages later… ‘APPLE’.
Robert Langdon, the protagonist is a ‘symbologist’, while his love interest Sophie Neveu is a cryptologist . Yet it is Langdon who figures out the five letter word that is the key coded to a ‘cryptx’ with only the impenetrable clues found at the tomb of Sir Issac Newton… Which much to readers surprise, and the cryptologist’s is ‘APPLE’… I have long suspected that Sophie-the cryptologist did not work this out purely because it is such a dumb obvious answer to the clues… Or it could be that Dan Brown is just a tad sexist and despite Sophie being a cryptologist, which is a real discipline, she could not possibly work any of this out without Langdon the ‘Symbologist’, which isn’t, explaining the ‘complicated’ bits…
Anyway, as I was saying ‘APPLE’
Why am I on a bit of a rant about ‘The DeVince Code’? you ask. Well for the most part because Cryptology plays a central part in our next Dear Edgars story ‘The Gold Bug’, a tale with a few issues, that is a little awkward to categorize. It could possibly be consider another of his ‘detective’ stories, though it is a very different type of story from the ones involving Dupin. It is a story however that among other things inspired Robert Louis Stevenson when he was writing treasure island and one that has influenced every tale of buried pirate treasure there after, right up to and including The Goonies…
The Gold Bug, was a story, also something of a treasure for Edgar, as he submitted it to a writing contest and won $100 for first prize. This was after he had originally sold it for $52 to Graham’s Magazine before he asked for it back to enter it in the contest and never returned the money. Instead he pocketed the original sum on the vague promise to write some reviews for the magazine. This was the most Poe ever made on a single story and it was also his most widely read stories in his life time. Only the poem ‘The Raven’ righted a larger audience.
Before we go any further however, we need to talk about the the major problem with the text, the portrayal and characterization of one of the main characters, Jupiter. Jupiter is an African American, formally a slave and now the servant of William Legrand, the narrators friend and acquaintance. In fairness to Poe he wrote this story in 1843, 18 years before the civil war and 23 before the slavery was finally ended in the United States. Jupiter as emancipated slave was something of a rarity in southern states. One who chose to stay with his master, as a paid servant, loyal to the last member of the family.
This may seem unlikely, but it was not as rare as one might think. Slavery was generational, a slave emancipated by his master at an advanced age oft knew no other life. So Jupiter choosing to stay and be a servant to the son of his former owner does not stretch credulity as much as we may think. It is also not the issue I have with the character of Jupiter. The issue is everything else about the former slaves portrayal. His dialogue is all written in unsophisticated Pidgeon English, showing him to struggle with complex concepts and with expressing himself. Showing him intellectually to be much the lesser of his white former master. Even to the extent of him not knowing his right from his left. Or for that matter even the concept of right and left. For which he is constantly belittled by his ‘beloved’ former master Legrand.
Now I do not for a moment think that every character should be portrayed as having the same intellectual gifts. But this was not the first time Poe portrayed a black servant as very much the ‘lesser’ to their white master, be they a slave or emancipated. This is also the most blatant such portrayal in his stories.
Then there is the matter of the words used to describe Jupiter that would not be used in such context today. Readers should be warned in this regard. The portrayal of Jupiter is very much ‘of its time’ and its time is pre-emancipation 1843. It grates on me as a modern reader, and I am not an African American. In much the same was a Sophie Neveu’s portrayal in The DeVince Code grates on me and I am not a woman…
Putting the issues with Jupiter aside the bulk of The Gold Bug is a treasure hunt. The hunt for Captain Kidd, reputedly buried treasure somewhere on Sullivans island, South Carolina. Legrand has quite by chance come across a mysterious parchment, written upon with invisible ink in a substitution cipher. A cipher that holds the key to the location of the notorious pirates buried treasure. Without explaining any of this to our narrator or Jupiter, Legrand takes them off on a mysterious hike into the woods at night. At the culmination of this hike Legrand sends Jupiter up a particular tree that the trio have been looking for. ( because southern gentlemen do not climb but old negro’s do). In the tree on a particular branch Jupiter finds a skull, nailed to the tree.
Legrand issues instructions telling Jupiter to drop a small object through the right eye socket of the skull. Which he does, after the whole left and right eye socket ‘hilarity of the black man not knowing his right from his left. And off the trio go with Legrand pacing out a number of steps and then taking a shovel, handing it to Jupiter so the servant could dig… (because southern gentlemen do not dig holes) and doing so they unearth a treasure… Eventually.
Its at this point Poe through Legrand explains what they are doing out in the woods dropping things through the eye sockets of old skulls nailed to trees. Legrand explaining how cleverly, through the use of logic, he managed to decipher Captain Kidds cryptograph. A feat somewhat more complicated that figuring out the five letter word to unlock The Device Code cyptex was APPLE, thankfully. Mostly this involves following rules as one might apply to solve any letter substitution code. The most common letter used in English is almost always E therefore the most common symbol in the cypher phrase is probably E, and so on.
Despite the issues with the story getting to the point of Legrand’s showboating as he explains just how to crack a cypher there is a lot to be said for it. It is interesting, compelling even, and it has had an impact far beyond it self. It an odd mystery story with an odder explanation. Imperfect but fascinating all the same. And like much of Poe’s work.
FOUR RAVENS, LOOKING AT ONE RAVEN REMOVED FOR REASONS…
Should you read it: Well yes, but with a wary eye, read it in full knowledge of its flaws
Bluffers fact: Leo Marks and William Friedman, and Englishman and an American who probably never met, were both inspired as children reading The Gold Bug to pursue an interest in cryptology. In the second world war they both served as code brakers for their respective governments, one working with SOE (the predecessor of MI5) the other cracking the Japanese Purple Code.
To an extent then, this Poe story shorted the second world war and saved the lives of many allied soldiers… Which is almost enough to forgive its flaws… And certainly more than the DeVince code ever managed to do…
(Things the last couple of weeks have been somewhat hectic in the Passing Place of late hence the blog has been quiet… normal service will resume shortly, but until then , buy book read books , enjoy books, and occasionally send a review… )
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
There is a more than even chance that you have at some point in your life read ‘The Telltale Heart’. There is a reason for this. The Telltale Heart is a story almost everyone in English speaking countries encounter at school in an English lit class because it is much beloved of English Curriculum makers. One of the main reasons for this is it is short enough for a teacher dealing with abused attention spans to read aloud in class, or give teenagers to read with some hope they will get to the end, and even possibly engage with it.
It is pure coincidence that it also happens to be one of the most perfect examples in all of English literature of corrupt first person narration. This is to say a narrator who’s version of events can not in any way be taken at face value.
In the very first paragraph, the one I have quoted above, the narrator takes pains to insist on his own personal sanity, something he repeatedly continues doing throughout. As he does so he goes on to explain that he lived with an old man to whom he professes no ill feeling. Nor, he tells us, did he have the slightest design upon the old mans money and property. Such is his love for the old man that if it wasn’t for one of his eyes being a filmy pale blue vulture like eye as we are told by the narrator, ever giving him an evil look, then he would never have murderously slaughtered him, chop up his body into tiny pieces, and hidden those pieces under the floor boards.
Our delightful, so very sane, narrator goes on to provide more proof of his sanity, such as the meticulous way he plans his crime, how carefully he creeps into the old mans room each night. Taking whole hours just to open the old mans bedroom door, a inch at a time, due to the squeaking of the hinges. Before observing his pray for hours on end but not acting on his need to kill for a week, because he loves the old man. he does not in fact act until the old mans ‘evil’ eye opens one night while he watches. Because it is the ‘evil’ aspect of the old mans eye that is his homicidal obsession.
All the rest of that aside, that it doesn’t occur to this ‘sane’ man to oil the door hinges during the day is some what telling… but maybe thats just me…
The narrator offers still more ‘proof’ of his sanity, having hacked the old man to death the night he opened his ‘evil’ eye, the careful way in which he butchers the old mans corpse and hides it under the floorboards, clearly displays he is of clear mind. For only a sane man would be so careful and considered in the concealment of his crime.
A logic by which you could prove the sanity of Doctor Cripin as he was entirely sane as he used an acid bath to dispose of his victims… Or indeed, the demon barber of Fleet street, Sweeney Todd, was in complete control of his faculties as he used his victims to supply the meat of his to Mrs Lovett of the pie shop down stairs…
Though it has to be said Mrs Lovetst’ pies were damn fine…
All this proof our narrator offers as to his sanity is in justification his final action in the story. When the police have arrived at the behest of a neighbor who heard screams in the night. The narrator shows them around the scene of the crime. Unperturbed by their presence, at least at first. But then he begins to hear a dull monotonous thudding sound coming from under the floor boards and his horror when he realises what it is.
How can they not hear it too?
That relentless thud, thud , thud that is the beating of of the tell tale heart of his victim.
It could be argued that when our Dear Edgar wrote The Telltale Heart he perfected the art of the short phycological horror story. this is certainly an argument the teachers of English Literature have been putting forward for a centaury or more. It is certainly the architype for stories narrated by those not entirely of sound mind. Many of the short stories of Robert W Chambers use the same core concept of a corrupt narrator who’s words can not be trusted at face value because their questionable sanity. Lovecraft uses the same trick repeatedly but never more so than in his seminal work ‘The Rats in the Walls‘. Part of the attraction of such stories is the reader is free to interpret the events being related. Free to decide if events did happen how they are told of if the narrators mental faculties twist teh telling.
As such tales go however, The Telltale Heart is not the most complex. Instead it is merely one of the first such stories, blurring the line between the narrators reality and the truth in such a corrupt fashion. In that it is frankly masterful. A story you know you can’t believe, but somehow want to. You want the heart to be beating under the floorboards, for all it becomes increasingly clear the narrator is insane. For all it is obviously his guilt making him imagine the hearts baneful rhythm. The image of a still beating heart beneath the floorboards remains a provocative thought provoking one.
It is a tale that can, and does, fire the imagination of even those most jaded of readers, bored teenagers in an English Lit classroom.
I speak from experience…
A SANITY OF RAVENS PEEKING THROUGH THE FLOORBOARDS
Should you read it: Yes, Though you more than likely already have at some point, read it again anyway…
Bluffers fact: Despite being one of the most evocative images in literature, for one generation at least it is surpassed by another heart beating under floorboards. The heart of Frank Cotton hidden beneath the floorboards of the attic in his old house, when his brother cuts himself and drips blood on the floorboards it seeps through and the heart begins to beat, as it does a circulatory system starts to rebuild itself around the heart ands slowly reform into Frank and drags his soul free of hell. Something a certain Cenobite calls Pinhead is less than chuffed about…
This incase you don’t get the reference, is one of the most graphic and surreal scenes in Clive Barkers Hellraiser. A movie based on Clive’s original novella The Hellbound Heart. A movie scene it is unwise to watch while tripping on mushrooms…
(Things the last couple of weeks have been somewhat hectic in the Passing Place of late hence the blog has been quiet… normal service will resume shortly, but until then , buy book read books , enjoy books, and occasionally send a review… )
At the end of the 1961 movie based, somewhat loosely, on this story by our Dear Edgar, Elizabeth, played by the Queen of all Scream Queens Barbara Steele, is gagged and trapped in the iron maiden, watches helplessly through the bars as three survivors step back out through the door to the torture chamber, which is then is closed and locked forever. This final scene is filmed from her point of view and brings to a chilling end to the movie that is somewhat etched in my memory from when I saw it many years ago.
Aside the wonderful Barbara Steele, the movie also features the immortal Vincent Price turning in one of the great roles of his career. The movie is something of a masterpiece of the horror genre with many a horror trope born of it. The movie was the second of eight movies based on Poe’s stories to be adapted, in a series that began with ‘House of Usher’ made by American International Pictures between 1960 and 1964, all but one of which stared Vincent. ‘Pit’ was also the most successful movie the studio ever produced. Which isn’t bad for a movie that has only a passing relationship with the sorce material…
Then again don’t they all.
You are probably aware by now that I and fond of the occasional tenuous link. So here is a rather tenuous link to the rather tenuous bluffers fact at the end of the The Mystery of Marie Roget about Italian horror movies. After ‘the Pit and the Pendulum’ Barbara Steele went on to become a major star in those same Spaghetti horrors. Which much like Spaghetti Westerns had something of a boom period in the 60’s and early 70’s. Italian Horror was very much the place to be…
But all that aside, the movie version of The Pit and the Pendulum, wonderful though it is, merely draws a little upon the original story. Indeed the first two thirds of the movie has no direct relation to the story at all. In essence the movie merely takes some of the horrific imagery from the original text and reproduces it in celluloid. In fairness to the screenwriters involved it would have been hard to make a movie based solely on the original story not least because a great deal of the story takes place in pit black darkness, and in the head of the only real character in the story and unnamed Englishman who falls afoul of the Spanish Inquisition.
This is where Poe’s story begins, with the narrators trial, a trail he doesn’t fully understand, not least of of the things he doesn’t not understand is what he stands accused of. Aside been English in the Spanish city of Toledo. Whatever his crime he is sentenced to death, and then falls unconscious as he is dragged to the place of execution. He awakens in darkness and it is here the horror of his situation comes home to him.
The Pit and the Pendulum is very much a phycological horror story. Some might, not incorrectly, say it is the titular phycological horror story. It is written to raise the heart rate, to put the reader on edge. Something it does rather too well. It is a technique that has been copied by many, layering on the neurotic fear, one layer at a time. Building the sense of hopelessness. The condemned narrator is tortured with his ever nearing demise. first in the darkness of a room he feels his way around, in the center of which is a gaping maw if a pit, a pit that will not kill those who fall into it, but will break their bones and leaving them in a state of lingering agony for many days until they finally die.
By luck more than judgement he avoids that fate only to awaken strapped to a table, while above him a crescent blade swings back and forth with metronomic precision. and after each swing it drops one notch lower. The narrator is faced again with his demise, a demise that is unescapable as time is the ending of us all. The pendulum measuring out time is a dark metaphor. Time will kill us all…
Of course, he escapes this doom in the end, which is almost a shame. This ending doesn’t ruining the story by any means, but somehow the bleak darkness of the movies ending is better. the narrator of Poe’s story survives these tortures and is freed when the French take Toledo. Give me Barbara Steele locked in an iron maiden watching he last hope extinguished any day… But I am not a glass half full kind of writer, I am more the glass is empty and your dying of thirst kind of writer…
This is hardly the first horror story Poe wrote, and certainly not the last, it is however the one that raised the bar, that made the phycological elements of the telling more important than the story itself. Pervious tales had elements of horror layered over the story. In this story the horror is the story. It is dark and all consuming that way. It is why it can get under a readers skin. Why a reader starts to feel the terror of the narrator as their own. Up to this point in Poe’s career, the story was unique and it is a style that many modern writers have tried to emulate. Lovecraft build his whole career on attempts to emulate this story.
It is a perfect tale in that respect, in that it does exactly what Poe set out to do. It gets under your skin, and crawls about…
A FLOCK OF RAVENS FULL OF DARK INTENT
Should you read it: Yes, when you are alone, in a dark room , by a single lamp… Alone with your heart beat…
Bluffers fact: In 1969 our dear queen of all scream queens Barbara Steel married a writer call Poe. James Wilber Poe , a screenwriter known for ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ ‘Around the world in 80 days’ and ‘they Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ among others. He was not in any way related to our own Dear Edgar as far as I can tell. Which was something of a disappointment as I spent a good hour trying to find out if this was the case, just because it would have made a better bluffers fact…
I have questions, many questions, but lets consider first why did Humpty fall. Obviously, people do fall off walls we know, but in general not just because they are just sat on them. In actuality, sitting on walls is not an inherently risky proposition.
As to why he was sat on the wall in the first place, well the obvious answer is of course to better view a military parade. This is after all why all the kings horses and all the kings men were passing by and thus able to attempt to patch him up. Mayhap therefore he got over excited, tried to stand up on the wall in order to get a better view and doing so slipped and fell.
This could make sense, except he was already high up. this was no mere garden wall he was sat on. he had to be high up because he ‘had a great fall’, not a minor tumbler. A great fall that did irrevocable damage… So why would he need to stand up, he should have been able to see everything perfectly well and remain seated on the wall. And the rhyme very clearly says he was sat on the wall, and doesn’t make any mention of him standing on it. If the purpose to the rhyme is to serve as a warning about the dangers of walls surely it would make mention of his standing on the wall. so no he was defiantly sat. So how did he fall?
How indeed… Was he perhaps pushed, and if so by whom… And why?
But that is one mystery which much like the occupant of a grassy knoll in Dallas Texas will remain unknown one suspects… But let us move on to the second part of the rhyme… Which if anything is more sinister
‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ , ‘Couldn’t put Humpty together again.’
Well, this begs a question, several in fact. Firstly, who was in charge. All the kings horse and all the kings men is a lot of men and a lot of horses. perhaps that is a little too literal, perhaps it refers to ‘The Kings Troop’ a ceremonial unit of the British army. Also known as the Royal Horse Artillery, that has teams of six horses pulling 13 pound gun carriages. With other members of The Kings Troop escorting on horseback. The unit has 140 men and women in it and twice as many horses. that’s a lot of men and horses. perhaps how literally all the kings horse and all the kings men but as far as parades are concerned they seem the likely candidates.
But why would all of them try to put Humpty together again. Do any of them have advances medical degrees? I would venture the horses do not. So why are they even trying, can someone not get the horses out of the way? I doubt the one hundred and forty men and women of The Troop include any doctors either. Medics perhaps, but only a couple of them at most, and why is an officer not taking charge?
Besides which since when would the parade stop, should there not be a couple of members of the St John’s Ambulance kicking about? Or are they all off blagging free entry to football matches and Glastonbury?* Or were they paid off as part of the conspiracy. I mean there isn’t a public event that doesn’t have at least a couple of them about, drinking tea and smiling with the vicar. I bet they even got to see Ozzy’s final gig for nothing….
But no, not a sign of the St John’s Ambulance, or an officer in charge, just a mad scrabble of horses and men utterly failing to put Humpty together again, as if medicine and the setting of broken bones was some kind of jigsaw. have you ever tried to do a jigsaw with 140 other people and a herd of bloody horses, no wonder they couldn’t put him together again…. They were all fighting over whether to start with a corner piece and the edge of just dive into the middle…
So pushed not fell, and no medical staff in attendance. Some one had it in for poor Humpty clearly… But all of this is as nothing, when we consider one final question, the great question , the one that we all should be asking ourself and has been hidden by the madness of horses and men .
Humpty Dumpty, why do we think of him as an egg…?
He isn’t… At no point does the rhyme say anything to imply he is an egg. Humpty was never an egg, Humpty was a person, a person forgotten in all this because of that braggard Lewis Carrol, a man ever fond of his drug induced fantasy life, and obsessed with his niece Alice, went out of his way to rewrite history and convince the world that Humpty Dumpty was an egg by portraying him as such in Through the Looking Glass.
What was Carrol motive in doing this?
What was he trying to hide?
Will we ever know?
What we do know for sure is this, Lewis Carrol was a card carrying member of The St Johns Ambulance…
Remember this, if nothing else, Humpty was never an egg until they told us he was. Believe what you will, but never believe what they tell you.
Humpty Dumpty was never an egg…
*the St John Ambulance are a wonderful organization and its members fine people who give up their free time to help people. I will not hear a word said against them… They may be listening…
To be a writer, you have to write… this was a conclusion I came to a few years ago, which still holds true. To borrow some advice from one more qualified to talk about successful writing than I…
This then is the crux of the matter. You can say you want to be a writer, dream of being a writer, you can even have the word ‘Writer‘ printed in your passport, but that is all for nothing unless you actually do some writing…
The problem, as is often the case, is there are some many other things to do rather than write, which is at best a solitary activity you undertake in your writing cave. There are movies to watch, TV series to absorb, books to read (because if you don’t read a lot you will never be a writer), a social life to have, work of the paying kind to do, social media, video games, watching a bunch of grown men run around a field chasing a leather ball, walking in the sunshine, spending time with friends, with family, life in general. There is in essence a lot to do and only so many hours in the day.
How then do you find time to write?
How indeed…
Well the simple answer is you make time. When, well that is down to you. It could be a setting aside couple of hours on an evening or getting up a couple of hours earlier on a morning to get some words down, or you could use your lunch hour at the daily grind. The when is not really important, it juts has to be your when. It is the doing that matters. Making yourself do what you need to do in order to write. Making a pact with yourself to do so.
This at least is what works for me.
I go through phases, some times I write with near religious further. The words flow because I need to write them and my need to write them out weighs all other concerns. Other times I have to force myself to write as much as a sentence. On occasion I don’t write at all, then I feel guilty for not doing so and eventually the guilt out weighs the apathy and I make myself write again.
When I am mid novel, and have a self imposed deadline no matter how vague, I make myself write a thousand words a day. Why a thousand, well its a nice round number, it is also about three pages in a standard typeset for a trade paperback, but mainly because that thousand words is long enough that it takes a couple of hours but short enough that it only takes a couple of hours. So when the words are not flowing I can still push myself to write for that length of time, if I don’t hit the word count it doesn’t matter, the time at the coal face is what matters, and if you return to the coal face every day the words will start to flow.
When I am working on a third draft the time spent is more important still. The first draft and the second to an extent tend to involve a lot of solid writing. Blocks of text it is easy to count and measure. A third draft and every draft after that, if I am still counting them, is polishing. the process of turning a perfectly acceptable sentence into something more. The difference between a perfect readable but prosaic story and, if one may be pretentious, art.
Third drafts are where the blood stains the page, where the soul is rendered in ink. Third drafts can take a moment to change one word among several paragraphs or hours to change three words in a sentence, that you will change again the following day. And again, and again until you are happy with it, which will never happen but by the old gods and the new you will try….
Third drafts therefore can only be measure in time, not words written. This is why setting aside time to write matters, and getting into the habit of doing so matters. Over the years I have developed ways to do this. I take time away from writing, though I still write things when I do, but when I am working on a book I actively set aside time and make myself do the work.
Of course, when the writing flows and the blood seeps into pages painlessly, the couple of hours I set aside often run over, and I get lost in the work , which isn’t really work then. But if I don’t force myself to make those couple of hours each day to start with the tap is never turned on.
To be a writer you have to write, it really is as simple and as complicated as that.
Just to note. writing blog posts like one is also writing. Regular readers may have noticed these tend to become more frequent when I am not actively writing a novel. This is entirely deliberate…
There is a phase that appears at the beginning of TV shows, movies, and books, which can be loosely taken to mean the entirety of what follows is almost utter fiction. That phrase is ‘Based on true events’. It is a phrase that crops up often at the beginning of mysteries, particularly is the mystery in question remains unsolved. There is a mystic to such things. Unsolved murders in particular, because we all love a good murder mystery and trying to solve it before the reveal. All the better if it is a real murder mystery as we all think we are smart enough to figure out who the real killer was…
Books pertaining to solve cold cases are something of a narrative tool themselves. If a police/detective show runs long enough there will be at least one episode where some author has been killed because he was writing a book about an unsolved murder and his manuscript will have been burnt, or a single copy will exist somewhere that will point to not only the original killer but the authors murder too.
‘Based on true events’ is a cliche, a trope so common we pay it no mind. Writers have been using it for years… In fact it is not unreasonable to say they have been using it since the autumn of 1842 when our own Dear Edgar dipped his toes in that particular well.
Poster for the 1942 movie version
The year before had seen the publication of Poe’s ground breaking detective story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. It had been a somewhat unexpected success, critically lauded, and having created a whole new genre of fiction, Poe discovered he had a public wanting more. While he was relatively successful as a writer by this point in his career, he had never had a story for which a publisher might ask him to write a sequel before. Generally given the kinds of stories he wrote there was no opportunity to do so. But there was money in longer serialized stores, and C. August Dupin was a character that he could bring back again. In what was to become very much the norm for fictional detectives, short of hurling them off a waterfall they could come back to new mysteries again and again and even throwing them off a waterfall was no guarantee they would stay dead…
So with the success of the Rue Morgue to his back Poe started trying to come up with a new mystery for his ratiocination detective to solve. And when he failed to come up with a suitable mystery of his own, he resorted to doing what mystery writers have done ever since, he looked to a real mystery and set about creating a solution. Yes, Poe not only invented the detective story, but he also invented the murder mystery ‘Base on True Events’…
The body of Mary Cecilia Rogers was found floating in the Hudson River on July 28th 1841. The police case to solve her death, which was widely believed to be a murder, reached national new papers. For a time it was a big story, but when her fiancée committed suicide a few months later and left a note full of remorse, many presumed that was the end of the matter. The case however has never been formally closed. Poe took the bones of the true story, which he claimed he was rigorous in researching and relocated the events from New York to Paris, where Dupin and his nameless friend the narrator lived in relative isolation, a year or so after the Rue Morgue murders.
As this was the second Dupin tale it has the advantage over it predecessor in that it doesn’t need a protracted prologue. half the original story was an extend introduction of Dupin the character. A somewhat tiresome over done introduction that grins on the reader until you get to the actual detective story. Poe neatly dispenses with the need for this by just assuming anyone reading the story has read the earlier one, for which we may all be grateful as that first third of The Murders at the Rue Morgue is just heavy going. In this story we drop straight into the mystery. Which si to its credit.
Marie is a perfume counter girl, rather than cigar girl, and end up in the Saine rather than the Hudson, but otherwise the key elements of the real murder are all here. Like Mary, Marie disappeared for a week three years before. Like Mary, Marie disappears again only to turn up dead. her fiancée is a key suspect, despite his denials and the whole things has a whiff of scandal to it (not least because there is some implication of Mary/Marie having a back street abortion in that missing week three years before.) The newspapers both the realm ones in New York and the fictional ones in Poe’s story make much of this and the lurid details of events. Indeed it is this that drives Dupin to investigate himself after complaining that newspapers thrive on sensationalism rather than truth.
Dupin the precedes to investigate, mostly by reading the newspapers and speculating, which is where the story starts to fall down a bit. There is no scene of the crime for Dupin and his chronicler to investigate. No where for him to make deductions based on observation. Everything is very much a case of him reading about the crime and then making some, admittedly astute, guesses in order to solve the crime. There isn’t even a reveal as such at the end, the real murder is apprehended after Dupin directs the police to find the boat in which Marie was carried out into the midst of the river. But the murder is apprehended off screen effectively.
In the end this is a story that disappoints, the constraints of ‘Based on true events’ are in part the issue. Having written the story so soon after the murder of Mary, when the truth was very much unknown is a good hook to pull in contemporary readers. Mary’s death was big news, speculations as to how she died were wide spread, the real murder had more than one fictional accounting, which was not uncommon at the time. Poe’s story is unique only in respect to being told as a detective story, and the way in which he drew parallels with a fictional crime rather than directly related Mary’s death. Poe’s postscript to the story, published with the third installment, makes the connection between the two abundantly clear. But the problem there is the modern reader only knows there was a real crime because of that postscript. The death of Mary Cecilia Rogers is a long forgotten crime almost two centuries old, not the current ongoing newsprint scandal.
Because it speculates on an unresolved murder, the story in itself is unresolved. The murder an unnamed sailor who’s motives remain unclear. And in all it reads much as an exercise in Poe displaying his own cleverness in trying to examine and try to explain a crime. It starts to become dry and lifeless very quickly after the first aspects of the murder are explained. and Dupin feels like nothing more than a dispassionate observer. It has neither the craft of the first Dupin story nor the skill in the telling. But then fiction is always best when it is fiction, and even if inspired by true events the further for the truth the better in most cases.
This second Dupin story is disappointing, a difficult second album with none of the invention of the original. It was not however the last, The Purloined Letter did not come along for three more years, but when it did, it out shone both this tale and arguably the more famous The Murders at the Rue Morgue. But we will come to The Purloined Letter in due course…
A TRIO OF RAVENS, ALL FEELING SLIGHTLY ARKWARD IF THEY ARE HONEST
Should you Read it: There is a certain completism that suggest you should read all three Dupin stories. The character develops little in this one but still noticeably, though the final tale is what pays for this one being underwhelming
Bluffers fact: It is no secret that Poe inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A fact Sir Arthur made no attempt to hide. In the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Watson compares Holmes to Dupin. Holmes replies, somewhat untypically
“No doubt you think you are complimenting me … In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow… He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appears to imagine”
Bonus Fact: Maria Montez who played Marie in the 1942 movie version died a mysterious death herself, when she drown in her bathtub in 1951, reportedly, according to the papers at the age of 31, (she was actually 39). Maria’s daughter Tina Aumont was also an actress with a long career in Italian cinema which included the lead role in the Surrealist classic The Howl, a masterpiece of a movie no one I have spoken to in the last thirty years has seen apart from me… Honestly your all philistines… Despite her extensive filmography Tina did not appear in a single movie I could reliably claim to be inspired by a Poe story, which is frankly irritating as has she done so it would have made for a delightful if tenuous fact…
Tina Aumont in The Howl, an Italian masterpiece you have never seen, one suspects
The Passing Place 