beccaelizabeth | (Reply)

From:

I gave up on Poe. Apparently there's only three Dupin stories anyway, and I've read two of them. They both assume the reader hasn't been paying attention and repeat and repeat and repeat everything, and the second is an utter failure as a detective story, wordy and never actually solving it, which is apparently because he was basing it on a real case and after he'd made his brilliant detective do all that big thinking on paper someone confessed and it was something completely different.

What I was quoting was Wilkie Collins, "The Woman in White". I've read the ending on Wiki instead and I don't think I'm going to miss much by ignoring the thing.

You're right though about how a lot of the unreadability is because subsequent writing ran the tropes into the ground. We're starting at the beginning of the detective story, and it looks clunky from here, cause they were making up the rules. Conan Doyle wrote Holmes partly because he'd read other people's detectives and thought they cheated with the clues not adding up and the solution coming by luck, or so says the book I was reading yesterday. It had an interesting bit about ideology, about the shift from the idea that the world pretty much just happens and sometimes that includes lucky and basically no one person can understand the big mysterious design, to the idea that one person can put clues together and understand not just the past but the future. Difference between medieval and victorian world views. Interesting theory.