According to Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite writers but unlike me he never wrote anything long and so it is often assumed that he never wrote much, to kill is to disgrace oneself, it is one of the man's misfortunes. Nothing could be more opposite to Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts by Thomas De Quincey or to the Theory Of The Moderate Murder by Gilbert K. Chesterton. As his is a world of fantasy tales, for Borges, it's Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the detective story genre, I could not agree more.
In creating a genre Edgar Allan Poe chose a distant character, a French gentleman, an impoverished aristocrat who lives in an isolated neighborhood of Paris with a friend named Auguste Dupin, the first detective in the history of literature. He pioneered a tradition of the detective story when he wrote The Murders In The Rue Morgue (The Locked Room Mystery). The fact of a mystery that is solved by the intellect and this feature is later carried out by another intelligent man named Sherlock Holmes, who will be later named Father Brown and Hercule Poirot and Jules Maigret and Philip Marlowe and of course, Robert Goren. But the first of them all, the archetype in C.G. Jung terminology, is Charles Auguste Dupin who lives with a friend and it is the friend who tells the story. This tradition was continued long after Poe's death by Arthur Conan Doyle who picks up the theme of the friendship between two different people, some way resembling the friendship between Don Quixote and Sancho:) Both Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie imagined a character of somewhat inferior intelligence, the former is named Dr. Watson and the latter is Captain Hastings.
Auguste Dupin's Paris By Edouard Leon Cortes
Poe could have placed his crimes in New York but then the reader would have been wondering whether the events really took place in that way. As it turned out, it was easier to Poe's imagination to set it all in Paris. Therefore the first detective recorded is a foreigner (remember Hercule Poirot is a Belgian) as Poe needed a distant character. He has left five examples of detective fiction, Thou Art The Man is the weakest of all, presumably. There we have a figure, the detective who turns out to be the murderer that was later imitated in Gaston Leroux's The Mystery Of The Yellow Room. Agatha Christie, in her best known and most controversial novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, tried somewhat the same feature in a different plot twist. Poe's another novel Purloined Letter on which Jacques Lacan has proposed psychoanalytical literary criticism and later on postmodern thinkers Gilles Deleuze nad Felix Guattari have argued the Lacanian possibilities of philosophizing Poe, is about the idea of hiding something in a visible way, making something so visible that noone sees it. Another Poe's story is The Mystery Of Marie Roget which is the strangest of all, concerns a crime committed in New York, almost as famous as Kitty Genovese Case which prompted a social psychological phenomenon known as the Bystander Apathy. A girl named Mary Rogers was murdered, by simply taking the information from the newspapers Poe moves the crime to Paris and renames the girl Marie Roget and then suggests how the crime may have been committed. Indeed, years later the murderer was found and confirmed what Poe had written! Definitely he was an intelligent man and produced the work of a genius. For instance, on another topic although Poe had no scientific training he was the first to solve Olbers' Paradox in his essay Eureka. In today's Behavioral Analysis Unit glossary Auguste Dupin was a profiler decidedly, so was Sherlock Holmes. According to an article published in Variety; Law & Order Criminal Intent started out of a desire for the Emmy and Pebody Award winning producer Rene Balcer to delve deeper into the psychology of criminals, then pit them against a hyper-vigilant sleuth out of the Sherlock Holmes mold, which became Detective Robert Goren. Inspired by the ways detective fiction uniquely reflects different cultures around the world, Balcer sought something similar for Robert Goren. In general Law and Order continues to be one of the best detective dramas ever produced. Many awards and nominations attest to the quality entertainment Law and Order, including an Edgar Allan Poe Award (popularly called the Edgars) as outstanding series.
A Man For All Seasons
A Great Video Of Robert Goren, By ElizaJane
