Mystery and Detective Genre Elements

The various elements in the stories “Man of the crowd” by Edgar Allan Poe and “In a Gove” by Akutagawa Ryunosuke place them within the mystery and/or detective fiction genres. The usual mystery or detective stories use suspense and tension to build up to the resolution of the puzzle that is present within the plot (Turco 58). Detective stories typically involves “following a detective through the solution of a crime” (Baker, Frye and Perkins, 140). The “Man of the crowd” and “In a Grove” does not have suspense or tension. In both stories the mystery or puzzle is not solved in the end, and the identity of the detective is not even known. Thus, they do not neatly fit within the typical conventions of the mystery or detective genres. Instead, the structure of the story itself - narration and organization of these stories - contribute to the pervading sense of mystery in the story through multiple narratives and foreshadowing, and the reader becomes the detective figure that is left to ponder about the solution to unsolved puzzle in the narrative. That is the underlying theme that all the stories in the mystery and/or detective genre share – a mystery.

The narration itself in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is saturated with mystery. The first paragraph of the text already speaks of a puzzle which is an unintelligible book, and people with untold secrets (220). This beginning paragraph of Poe’s story already foreshadows the ending of the story, where the narrator concludes that he will not be able to learn anything about the old man, much like a book that cannot be read (234). Fink also thinks that this is a foreshadowing, as he states in his article that this paragraph’s description of “people who, metaphorically, cannot be ‘read’… for...

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... reader becomes the detective figure as he or she is left with the unresolved and unexplained mysteries that are in the narrative. These two stories, while not the archetypal examples of mystery and detective genre, are still brilliant works that are under those genres.

Works Cited

Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. "In a Grove, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa." Scribd.com., 28 6 2008. Web. 6 Apr 2014.

Baker, Sheridan, Northrop Frye, and George Perkins. The Harper Handbook to Literature. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985. Print.

Fink, Steven. "Who is Poe's "Man of the crowd"?." Poe Studies. 44.1 (2011): 17-38. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Selected Poetry and Tales”. The Man of the Crowd. Ed. James M. Hutchisson. Peterborough:Broadview, 2012. 288-294. Print.

Turco, Lewis. The Book of Literary terms. London :University Press of New England, 1999. Print.