THE BLACK CAT (1843)

The justly famous BLACK CAT is particularly amusing for its inversion of the rational mode of Poe's own detective Dupin. Poe knows that no one reading the story will credit the narrator's opening statements:

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified — have tortured — have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror — to many they will seem less terrible than baroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place — some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.

Obviously, though Poe never shows the reader a literal ghost, any more than he did in METZGERSTEIN, he surrounds his titular feline with so many weird coincidences that no reader seriously believes that the cat can be explained by "very natural causes and effects."

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1840)

If one accedes to the general view that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is the first detective story, it's interesting that it's also a prime example of an *uncanny* phenomenality, one in which the author conjures forth an irreducible strangeness, despite the fact that the author tries to stay within the bounds of materailistic causality, where no transgressions of natural law take place. The source of the strangeness is, as most readers will know, the culprit in a Parisian double-murder, whom detective Dupin flawlessly deduces to be an out-of-control ourang-outan.

I have to imagine that generations of Poe readers have probably to vault over the first four or so pages of the story, in which Poe subjects readers to a philosophical lecture on his theories of "ideality," by which he seems to mean something like Kant's idea of reason. This lecture in turn leads one to a prelude in which Dupin first demonstrates his peerless ability to divine his roommate's inward thoughts by external observation of the man's physical responses and verbal communicaitons. It's almost beyond question that Conan Doyle copied aspects of Sherlock Holmes from Dupin, even if Dupin was not the only influence on Holmes. But it seems Poe, unlike Doyle, really considered the "mind-reading" trick a bagatelle, since Dupin doesn't even make a point of emphasizing this skill in his last two stories.