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EDGAR ALLAN POE is considered by most detective fiction historians to be the founding father of the detective story, and his “Murders in the Rue Morgue” the world’s first detective story. Such an auspicious beginning staked out for any literary genre should always be suspect, and the suspects in this case are the detective historians themselves. Howard Haycraft, probably the most renowned of this group, divides detective fiction historians into two schools: the majority, including Haycraft himself, who maintain that the detective genre was born with Poe; and a minority, who hold that elements of the detective story were present in literature as early as the Bible and thus strictly speaking Poe was not the inventor of the type but rather its chief proponent.
Haycraft, in his book Murder For Pleasure: Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941:6), discusses at length the fundamental arguments of these two camps. The former is based on a phenomenological approach which claims that in order to have detective stories—to be distinguished of course from mysteries—you must have police forces and detectives. These did not exist per se before the early part of the nineteenth century, when criminal investigation departments began to burgeon in Paris and London. As the final word, Haycraft quotes the English bibliophile George Bates’s view on the matter: “The cause of Chaucer’s silence on the subject of airplanes was because he had never seen one. You cannot write about policemen before policemen exist to be written of.” The detective method is therefore viewed as less essential to the genre by these historians than the plot/structure elements.
