Poe Centenary Article

A nice little article on Poe's contribution to the formation of the detective genre:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7833135.stm

Argento / Poe / de Quincey / Hitchcock

I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.
- Dario Argento

Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?" Death–was the obvious reply. "And when," I said, "is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?" From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious–"When it most closely allies itself to Beauty; the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.
- from Edgar Allan Poe's Poe essay The Philosophy of Composition

[L]et us treat it [murder] æsthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way. Such is the logic of a sensible man, and what follows? We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
- from Thomas de Quincey's essay On Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts

The plot of Patrick Hamilton's play Rope was billed as “sugested by Thomas de Quincey” - Hitchcock enjoyed quoting his Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts – but drew its more obvious inspiration from a notorious American crime of 1924.
Hitchcock had followed the newspaper stories about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, a pair of reportedly brilliant University of Chicago students and homosexual lovers who were obsessed by the superman theories of Nietzsche. In order to prove their superior intellects, Leopold and Loeb had committed a completely motiveless killing – murdering a young acquaintance just for the thrill of it”
- from Patrick McGilligan's Hitchcock biography Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Poe / Argento II

"Poe's major claim to fame is as the father of the short story. In November 1838 he published [...] 'How to Write a Blackwood Article'. This is a slight, rather wearying satire on the contemporary taste for 'sensation' stories, wherein the central character is found in a terrible predicament involving incarceration, torture or the threat of an awful death, his or her sensations as they happen being minutely described."

- John S. Whitly, Introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

What I think is interesting here is the line of descent this suggests, from this sensation story through to the early pre-narrative / Classical Hollywood style cinema of attractions and the sensation literature emphasised by Fritz Lang in relation to Dr Mabuse der Spieler, all the way to the attenuation of narrative logic in Argento in favour of the sensational and spectacular of the set-pieces.

Poe / Argento

"It has often been asserted that there are [...] two Poes; the writer of tales of imagination, where the irrational reigns supreme, and the writer of mystery tales whose cardinal emphasis is on the operation of the reasoning faculties."

- John S. Whitly, Introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination

I thought this was interesting in relation to the logic of Argento's gialli and the illogic of his horror films and, that - as Whitly argues for Poe - they are maybe ultimately one and the same, confounding the linear, rational, scientific mindset.