The Craft of American Detective Fiction

John Gruesser emphasizes the malleability of American detective fiction in this study by selecting groups of authors from different periods to demonstrate how they and their fiction responded to their culture. In a remarkable way Gruesser argues that detective fiction reflects the development of modern society because of its adaptability—a feature of this kind of story since its introduction by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe wrote five detective stories, and he competed with himself in each successive story, striving for originality, adaptability, and fluidity in how the detective story might be told. Women and African Americans have been able to employ detective fiction “as a means of addressing social and political issues of particular concern to themselves” because of its innate competitiveness and adaptability.

To a great extent Gruesser is more concerned with the authors of these stories than with their detectives. He is particularly interested in revealing how the authors of detective fiction control their audiences. Gruesser’s concern is particularly significant in light of Poe’s underlying conviction that a story should “create an effect” on its audience. Rather than teach a lesson the way an essay or a sermon might do, Poe believed that a story should make a person feel a certain way. For Gruesser’s purposes the detective story has the capacity to manipulate a person’s perspective on a particular social issue.

Agreeing with Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers that Poe created the basic mystery plots used to the present day, Gruesser has given a descriptive name to each of Poe’s three Dupin stories: “the whatwuzit of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ the whodunit of ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and the whereisit of ‘The Purloined Letter.’” Gruesser does not explore the other two detective plots found in Poe’s “Thou Art the Man” and “The Gold-Bug,” but they are equally important. Such movies as National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as all the Harry Potter stories, follow the plot of “The Gold-Bug.” Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie were devoted to the plot of “Thou Art the Man,” in which the detective can produce no evidence to convict the culprit; therefore the villain must be tricked into confessing the crime. Gruesser shows that in responding to and interacting with the earlier classic form of the detective story, twentieth-century authors, who created the hard-boiled detective, mix their plots in a way that results in what Raymond Chandler called more “what the hell went on” than “whodunit.”

In his stories Poe competes with his readers to solve the mystery—just as he had challenged his readers to solve puzzles and riddles in his newspaper columns. By writing a sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” however, Poe begins to compete with himself to write a better mystery. Poe’s detective competes with an adversary in “The Purloined Letter,” but in all the Dupin stories his detective competes with the police. Citing several other scholars of detective fiction, Gruesser argues that Dupin lacks the moral compass that motivates later fictional detectives owing to his own self-interest in his investigations. Perhaps Gruesser is correct, but the point of the kind of story Poe has created—especially in light of Gruesser’s own thesis about manipulating the reader, and in light of Poe’s thesis about creating an effect in the reader—is that he affects the moral compass of the reader. The reader brings the concept of justice and moral outrage to the story and Poe exploits it without the need for any moralizing by Dupin.

By moral compass Gruesser means the extent to which an author engages the great moral issues of the day. In the section after Poe, Gruesser tries out his thesis on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, and Mark Twain. Though all these writers were abolitionists, Gruesser stresses the way that detective fiction addressed broader social issues such as gender justice that figures prominently in The Scarlet...