SOURCE: Merivale, Patricia. “Gumshoe Gothics: ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and His Followers.” In Narrative Ironies, edited by Raymond A. Prier and Gerald Gillespie, pp. 163-79. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1997.

In the following essay, Merivale examines Edgar Allan Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” as a precursor to metaphysical, or postmodern, detective fiction.

We, reading the detective novel, are an invention of Edgar Allan Poe.

Borges, “The Detective Story,” 21

“An excellent idea, I think, to start from a dead body” said Kobo Abe (Inter Ice Age 4, 47) and Hubert Aquin, similarly, “l'investigation délirante de Sherlock Holmes débute immanquablement à partir d'un cadavre” (“Sherlock Holmes's dizzying investigation unfailingly starts off from a corpse” [Trou de mémoire, 82]). About how the classical detective story starts they were both right. But of course quite often there isn't a corpse in the postmodern library: “There is no body in the house at all...