Uncanny and Ungrammatical Shudders: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Master Stroke of Cant’

Abstract

This essay argues that all detective fiction stems from an Urtext, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), whose metaphysical credentials have been well established. Edgar Allan Poe’s tale founds the genre’s recurring instances of metaphysical convulsion. Thus, whenever that famous reflexive joke is trundled out, and a character marvels at the way that events happening in the story are more like detective fiction than real life, the text is in fact revealing (coyly, covertly but also brashly, overtly) its fundamental, metaphysical nature as simultaneously present and absent. By theorising such reflexivity as a shudder, this essay seeks to demonstrate, through various instances found in Agatha Christie’s novels, that detective fiction demands to be read critically from beginning to end, and not only for the apparent pleasures of solving the crime.