Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet (review)

Edgar Allan Poe has arguably been a thorn in the side of crime fiction studies for some time. Stephen Knight has sought to dethrone Poe as the founder of the genre (Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics: Detecting the Delights of 21 Enduring Stories (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015)), putting forward American predecessors. Others (Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007); Lucy Sussex, Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Melbourne: Text, 2015)) have spoken out against the monogenetic or immaculate-conception theory that sees crime fiction burst out of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Sub-genres have been forged to contain Poe, including analytic, metaphysical, and philosophical detective fiction. French crimefiction studies, as a national category, as opposed to sub-category, has struggled equally to work around him, to fit him in, or to justify his exclusion. Where Andrea Goulet excels in this new study is in cutting through any number of such knots. Putting it, as she herself notes, baldly, ‘Edgar Allan Poe invented French crime fiction’ (p. 3). On its own, Goulet’s short prologue makes a striking contribution to the field, provocatively hitting head-on the problem of what to do with Poe, who, she writes, ‘was speaking in 1841 what may now be called “Global French”, a language that paradoxically reaches transnational proportions through local particularity’ (p. 1). The ‘French’ of Goulet’s French crime fiction is a provocation: it refers both to a specific space and language, and to their interaction with the transnational, the translational. She places French at the heart of crime fiction while simultaneously mobilizing its referentiality in multiple directions (Balkanizing it, perhaps, to extend her own play on such shifting, ultimately auto-antonymic terms). Every chapter of Goulet’s book resists unidirectionality, seeking contradictions and counter-movements at every turn. Her principal interest (among oppositions including transnational versus local spaces, horizontal versus vertical mappings, and political versus domestic violence) are maps and mapping; and yet, what she refuses is any clear mapping of the evolution of French crime fiction. Despite this cartographic argument against mappability, Goulet’s study itself transitions clearly from a deliberately, and justifiably, complex prologue and introductory first chapter on mapping crime to a set of reader-friendly case studies. From Élie Berthet to Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc, from Sébastien Japrisot to Fred Vargas, from Léo Malet to Didier Daeninckx, from Émile Gaboriau to Michel Butor, and concluding with Maurice Dantec and Vladan Radoman, Goulet plays the same, but always evolving, double game: she deconstructs the generalizations of broad-brush criticism, refusing to simplify the complex, while providing clear insights into literary works of at times overpowering complexity. All Goulet’s chapters make connections and are interconnected (horizontally), but all also dig deep (vertically). And Poe, of course, haunts them, appearing (unannounced, palimpsestuously) in such quotes as the following from Japrisot’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles: ‘Victoria Anna Penoe’ (p. 134). Goulet’s book is a legacy, a cartography, a celebration of absence/presence, and as such it is a powerful and readable study of French crime fiction.