DARK SHADOWS FORUMS
General Discussions => Current Talk '24 I => Topic started by: Philippe Cordier on September 17, 2023, 05:04:33 PM
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The other day I picked up a paperback collection of 10 stories by Poe and noticed that there was one I've been meaning to read for several years, "Thou Art the Man." A couple of years ago I made a study of Poe's three detective short stories, a genre he created, but I hadn't gotten to this one which is sometimes also said to fall into the detective category, a story of what Poe called "ratiocination." This one is rather lightweight from a literary standpoint, especially compared to "The Purloined Letter," which I think is a masterpiece of literary perfection. The tone of "Thou Art the Man" is quite humorous and, along with its small-town Americana setting, reminded me of Mark Twain (who wrote a few detective stories himself).
Imagine my surprise when I found that one of the characters, an older gentleman who disappears and is believed (correctly) to have been murdered, is named "Barnabas." I had never come across that information in any Dark Shadows discussions or books that I can recall.
While the story bears no resemblance to "Dark Shadows," it still could be the source for Barnabas's name, unless we know that the name "Barnabas" was definitely picked up from a New England tombstone, which I think I read years ago.
"Thou Art the Man" is a rather quick read and I would recommend it as a "Saturday Evening Post" type of story and not one of Poe's masterpieces of terror. In a paragraph introducing the story in my old Scholastic copy (which somehow I had at hand), it's said that this story introduced a new aspect to detective fiction, that of the (amateur) detective narrator, a fact I had read nowhere else despite my extensive reading into the history of detective fiction.
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Coincidence or not that’s still really interesting.
I’ve really only ever read the most famous two of Poe’s stories.
I didn’t know he or Twain ever made detective stories.
Those will definitely be worth finding. I imagine Project Gutenberg might have them and I could even use text to speech on my phone and listen if I wanted.
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I'm guessing that the two "most famous" Poe stories you have read are probably "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" . . . Those are the first two I remember reading. I remember reading Poe's first tale of detection ("ratiocination" is the term he uses), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in my junior high school library. There's also "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." Some would include "The Gold-Bug" and others include "Thou Art the Man" among Poe's detective works.
It's harder to find complete information about Mark Twain's forays into detective fiction. There are a couple with a faux-medieval setting, but the best of Twain's that I've read is the rather dark "A Thumb-Print and What Came of It," which is the first work of fiction in which a fingerprint is used in solving a crime.
Here are two links you may find helpful:
http://www.telelib.com/authors/T/TwainMark/prose/lifeonmississippi/lifeonmississippi31.html (http://www.telelib.com/authors/T/TwainMark/prose/lifeonmississippi/lifeonmississippi31.html)
"A Thumb-Print and What Came of It" (Mark Twain)
https://www.eapoe.org/works/stedwood/sw0305.htm
(https://www.eapoe.org/works/stedwood/sw0305.htm)
"Thou Art the Man" (Edgar Allan Poe) (The murder of Barnabas Shuttleworthy)
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How interesting! I don't think I've ever heard of that one -- I'll have to look it up.