Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [38]
Seeing the popularity of such lively journalism, the newspaper publisher Émile de Girardin decided to publish fiction outright and developed the feuilleton, or serial. In 1836, the first issue of his La Presse contained the premier installment of an exciting novel with the promise of additional chapters to come. The French public took to the feuilletons with such enthusiasm that they became virtually obligatory for any newspaper trying to increase its circulation. Major authors’ works often appeared first in this format and were afterward released in book form. Perhaps the most popular of the romans feuilletons, or serial novels, was Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris, which tripled the circulation of Le Journal des Débats, where it appeared between 1842 and 1843. The author received an offer of 100,000 francs for his next serial even before a word was written, a fantastic figure for the day, making Sue one of the highest-paid authors in France.
Faits divers and feuilletons were new only in format, for people had written stories about crimes since ancient times. The truly innovative literary genre of the nineteenth century was the detective story, in which the crime is only a prelude. Detective stories appealed to a more sophisticated public by presenting a puzzle that the reader seeks to solve before, or at least along with, the detective-hero.
The first modern detective story, in which the central character’s importance lies in his ability to detect, was written by an American, Edgar Allan Poe. He was inspired by Vidocq’s Memoirs to create the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in the story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841. 21 Poe set the tale in Paris and even included a reference to Vidocq. The character Dupin, portrayed as a man of culture and scientific learning, remarks, “Vidocq was a good guesser and a persevering man. But without educated thought, he erred continually.” 22
Poe’s detective stories were written before many American cities had any kind of organized police force and before London’s Scotland Yard had been established. Indeed, the very word detective did not appear until two years after the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” when Sir James Graham, the British home secretary, formed a special group of officers called the Detective Police. Poe himself called his stories “tales of ratiocination.” 23
Poe had scientific interests as well as literary ones. Indeed, the very same issue of the magazine that published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” also contained an article by Poe on photography, which had just been invented by two Frenchmen, Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre. And Poe’s detective was a particularly modern hero, one who used his mental faculties to resolve the crisis — the mystery — he faced. He might carry a weapon, but his true power came from his intellect and a rigorous scientific mind-set.
That was not the only precedent set by Poe. As the critic Julian Symons notes about him: “He… established the convention by which the brilliant intelligence of the detective is made to shine more brightly through the comparative obtuseness of his friend who tells the stories.” 24 This obtuse friend — not an outright bumbler, but someone unable to come close to the detective in terms of deductive brilliance — became another standard of the genre, most notably, of course, with Dr. John Watson, the foil to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, acknowledged his debt to Poe, slyly having Watson remark to Holmes, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin.” And Conan Doyle would write frankly in Through the Magic Door: “Poe is to my mind, the supreme, the original short-story writer of all time.” 25
Though Poe’s stories were set in a Paris that didn’t exist, they were soon translated into French. In November 1845, the Revue Britannique published a translation of “The Gold Bug,” but it was not until the following year, when the Parisian newspaper La Quotidienne published a loose three-part translation of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” that the French public