2 - The German Crime Story in the Twenty-First Century

Summary

THE SHORT STORY and the detective story have been closely linked from their beginnings. Although there is a good case to be made for earlier versions of the detective story, most histories of the genre trace the origin of the modern detective story to Edgar Allen Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Poe was also among the earliest theorists of the short story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short fiction written six years after his highly influential detective story, Poe contrasted what he termed the “tale”—but what we would today refer to as the short story— with the novel, arguing that the disparate lengths of the two forms lead to fundamental differences between them. “As the novel cannot be read at one sitting,” he argues, “it cannot avail itself of the immense benefit of totality.” The brevity of the short story, in contrast, enables its author “to carry out his full design without interruption. During the hour of perusal, the soul of the reader is at the writer's control.”

Granted this control, Poe argues further, the short story can be skillfully constructed to culminate in “a certain single effect” to which all events, incidents, and elements lead up: “In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.” Compare S. S. van Dine's famous rules of the detective story, which, he argues

should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion.