Sensation

Abstract

Before he was made into a writer of ‘detective fiction’, Poe was known, as we have seen, as a writer of ‘enigma’ stories, one of the terms used in the early 1860s to describe the sort of fiction which was based on the unravelling of plots and secrets. The term ‘detective fiction’ employed from the 1880s inherited and intensified the critical stigmatization and devaluation to which this sort of fiction was subjected. A classic example of the decay of the literature of mystery supposedly represented by ‘detective’ fiction is seen in the changing attitude of Henry James to the narrative of the servant, Mrs. Beard, in The American: as she pauses in her telling of her ‘lurid tale of family murder’, James comments in 1877: ‘the most artistic of romancers could not have been more effective. Newman made a movement as if he were turning over the page of a novel’; but in the 1907 revised edition, James writes: ‘the most expert story-teller couldn’t have been more thrilling. Newman made almost the motion of turning the page of a “detective story”’ (my italics).¹ The appellation ‘detective’ serves to denigrate the artistry and belittle the effect of what of course remains the same tale.