I've just finished 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' by Edgar Allan Poe and was surprised to discover that it was quite different from his first story about the classical detective and his anonymous narrator. In terms of the structure and realism of the story these changes were for the better. The scenario was far more credible than in 'the Murders in the Rue Morgue' and the reader was given plenty of opportunities to work out aspects of the case before Dupin revealed them. However, this gain in credibility and foreshadowing sadly came at the expense of much of the gothic atmosphere that made 'the Rue Morgue' attention grabbing despite its stylistic flaws.
Not everything has changed between the two books. Dupin and the narrator are still just as misanthropic and disconnected from reality as in the prequel. The fictional detective makes no effort to turn his amateur efforts into a full time job and sees the pleas of the police and admirers for help as a distraction from his daily activity of “weaving the dull world around us into dreams”. He seems to carry out his investigations for his own personal amusement and (possibly) profit rather than out of any sense of duty or care for his fellow man. Thankfully, his wit also remains untarnished with the narrator comically relating his sleeping (eyes disguised behind his green-shaded spectacles) through the Prefect's briefing, after he takes on the case. Dupin obviously retains a very Holmes-like disdain for the inferences of intelligent men in the police and the media and this arrogant attitude is reinforced throughout the story. A final similarity is the way in which Poe begins both stories with an abstract conversation on analysis, coincidence and deduction before applying these principles in the narrated story that follows.
The major difference between the two stories is that the scenario presented in 'Marie Roget' is far more credible. Again we are presented with a complex crime about which we are given a large dump of information including what we would now call forensics. However, this time there are no sudden appearances by Orang-outangs to clash jarringly with the Victorian setting. The crime turns out to be fairly mundane as crime fiction set ups go and the reader is given more scope to predict the outcome before Dupin works it out. Stylistically I think this makes it a better book but in doing so the book loses some of the atmosphere of the first story. 'The Rue Morgue' for all its structural faults (as I see them) contained plenty of motion. The protagonists visit the crime scene and cunningly apprehend the man unwittingly complicit in the killing. 'Marie Roget' is a longer book but is almost entirely static. After the visit from the Prefect, the rest of the book sees Dupin and the narrator merely research newspaper articles and discuss their findings. Poe even cops out of the possibility of adding some excitement when Dupin works out who committed the crime. The intention of the original serial seems to have been to suggest that Poe had worked out the circumstances of a real murder, similar to that in the book, which had happened in America. By omitting the chase the editors may have hoped to further this impression – if 'Marie Roget' had genuinely been an account of real police procedures they might not have been allowed to write about it. However, it remains a piece of bad story telling that is totally baffling to me.
As pointed out above this lack of narrative and character motion seems to be a novel introduction in the second Dupin story rather than a universal feature of Poe's detective stories. However, it definitely highlights a weakness of this story when compared to the Sherlock Holmes novels. Arthur Conan Doyle's stories are never static. Holmes investigates crimes scenes, journeys around the country to find clues and meet significant characters and on more than one occasion ends up in life or death fights with his adversaries. This means that Holmes novels are nearly always page turners independent of the quality of the plots or characters. It is a shame that Edgar Allan Poe is not as consistent in this respect. I really like the darker, more gothic edge to his detectives and it would have been interesting to see how they could have been further developed. Unfortunately there is little character development in 'Marie Roget'. The only event of note is that Dupin accepts a large fee for his work whereas in 'the Rue Morgue' he was merely content with the satisfaction of having surpassed the bumbling policemen. Could this be an end to his penniless and miserable days?
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