Dead Letter and The Figure Eight

Victor Metta Fuller Victor

Description

Before Raymond Chandler, before Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, there was Metta Fuller Victor, the first American author-man or woman-of a full-length detective novel. This novel, The Dead Letter, is presented here along with another of Victor's mysteries, The Figure Eight. Both written in the 1860s and published under the name Seeley Regester, these novels show how-by combining conventions of the mystery form first developed by Edgar Allan Poe with those of the domestic novel-Victor pioneered the domestic detective story and paved the way for generations of writers to follow.In The Dead Letter, Henry Moreland is killed by a single stab to the back. Against a background of post-Civil War politics, Richard Redfield, a young attorney, helps Burton, a legendary New York City detective, unravel the crime. In The Figure Eight, Joe Meredith undertakes a series of adventures and assumes a number of disguises to solve the mystery of the murder of his uncle and regain the lost fortune of his angelic cousin.

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 05 août 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385349
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Metta Fuller Victor

T H ED E A DL E T T E R & T H EF I G U R EE I G H T

I N T R O D U C T I O NB YC A T H E R I N ER O S SN I C K E R S O N

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Metta Fuller Victor

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2003

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Design by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Janson with Bulmer display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 

The Dead Letter: An American Romance was originally published in  by Beadle and Company under the name of Seeley Regester.

The Figure Eight; or, The Mystery of Meredith Placewas originally published in  by Beadle and Company under the name of Seeley Regester.

Contents

Introduction 

The Dead Letter: An American Romance

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The Figure Eight; or, The Mystery of Meredith Place

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Introduction

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The two novels presented here are foundational, but long-forgotten, works in the history of American detective fiction. Fans, collectors, and literary historians almost universally point to Edgar Allan Poe as the in- ventor of the detective story, and most go on to trace the development of the detective novel in the work of British writers like Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. They tend to return to the American scene only with the arrival of the hard-boiled style in the s, a violent, minimalist aesthetic most fully expressed in the work of Dashiell Hammett. What this history of detective fiction overlooks is the fact that between the s and the s the detective novel flourished in the United States—in the hands of women writers. Metta Fuller Victor was the first writer, male or female, to produce full-length detective novels in the United States with the publication ofThe Dead Letterin  andThe Figure Eightin . Those novels, which blended several popular genres with the central plot of murder and its investigation, influenced other writers, especially Anna Katharine Green, who was the most successful author of detective novels in the postbellum period. Green in turn influ- enced many women writers, creating an identifiable tradition of women’s detective fiction that extends well into the twentieth century. The close association of that tradition with an earlier body of popular women’s writ- ing, the domestic novel of the s, produced a style we can call domes- tic detective fiction because of its distinctive interest in moral questions regarding family, home, and women’s experience. We do not have a great deal of information on the life of Metta Fuller Victor, though we do have her prolific legacy of fiction. Born in , she grew up in Pennsylvania and Ohio and attended a female seminary. She began to write poetry as a teenager, often with her sister Frances Fuller, and the two published a volume of poetry when Metta Fuller was twenty.

She went on to a remarkable career in the dime novel and was success- ful in several genres for both children and adults: the western, the ro- mance, temperance novels, and rags-to-riches tales. She wrote relatively little under her own name and chose different pseudonyms for different genres, a practice that allowed her to develop a following among several sectors of readers. When she was twenty-five, she married Orville Victor, editor of Beadle and Adams, and it seems fair to say that she built the Beadle empire of publications with him. She was editor ofBeadle’s Home andBeadle’s Monthly,in whichThe Dead Letterfirst appeared in serial form in . Victor was best known for an abolitionist dime novel (which she published under her own name) calledMaum Guinea and Her Plantation ‘‘Children’’(). Alongside this highly productive career in letters, she raised nine children. In  she publishedPassing the Portal,a book that purports to be an autobiography but is quite frustrating to would-be biog- raphers since it conforms remarkably closely to the conventions of domes- tic fiction and not to the facts we do know about her life. Her career enriches our picture of the cultural place of popular fiction at midcentury, for she was both a skilled operator within the cheap, popular market and a serious-minded moral reformer, writing vehement fictional and editorial pieces against slavery, alcohol, and Mormon polygamy. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrity female author emerged as an increasingly significant figure, with the polemical Harriet Beecher Stowe, the dramatic E. D. E. N. Southworth, and the wry Louisa May Alcott as leading lights. Victor worked both the domestic reform and the (more daring) thriller angles open to women writers in this period. The way that she published fiction on reform-movement themes under her own name and other less reputable genres under pseudonyms shows that her solu- tion to the limitations of the literary market was similar to that of Alcott, whose numerous pseudonymous thrillers have only recently been recon- nected to an author known as ‘‘the Children’s friend.’’ Yet Victor does not seem to have been nearly as secretive as Alcott; moreover, with her posi- tion of power at Beadle and Adams, she had more control over the content and publication of her own work. Indeed, we have to understand her as a publisher and editor as well as an author, someone very close to the com- mercial meaning of popularity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the power of literature to strike a chord of sympathy or social outrage. In her detective fiction, her main purpose is to entertain, yet we also see strik- ing reflections of the historical and cultural concerns of the immediate postbellum period.

Victor wroteThe Dead LetterandThe Figure Eightunder the pseudonym of Seeley Regester. In each, she takes the apparatus of the detective story Poe 2            

set forth in the ‘‘tales of ratiocination’’ of the s (namely, ‘‘The Mur- ders in the Rue Morgue,’’ ‘‘The Purloined Letter,’’ ‘‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’’ and ‘‘The Gold-Bug’’) and expands it into a full-length novelis- tic form. As far as we can ascertain, she is the first American writer, male or female, to do so. (Interestingly, Alcott employs a semiparodic version of Poe’s Auguste Dupin in her  thriller ‘‘V. V., or Plots and Counter- plots,’’ but the story does not have the requisite structure and plot elements to function as detective fiction.) The basic narrative structure that Poe established, and that all writers since have worked from, is a doubled one, according to the narrative theorist Tzvetan Todorov. The narrative that we follow as readers is the story of an investigation and features the de- tective in a starring role. It commences with the discovery of a corpse or corpses and proceeds through the gathering of physical evidence, inter- viewing of witnesses, identification of suspects, and revelation of the mur- derer. Below the surface of the novel is another story—the story of the murder—including the motives, methods, coverup, and subsequent mur- ders connected to the first. The main job of the detective is to reconstruct the story of the murder, a story deliberately fragmented and buried by the murderer, who will be identified and punished as soon as the true story is known. In the paradigm that Poe laid down, the detective story is a battle of wits between the brilliant detective and the devious criminal, and its great pleasure is the ‘‘aha!’’ moment when we watch the detective name the murderer and explain the chain of intellectual processes by which he came to know the answer to an enigma. As the brevity of Poe’s stories suggests, he first conceived the detec- tive story, for all its structural sophistication, as a concentrated form. Victor brought a very different aesthetic to the story of criminal investi- gation, that of the popular women’s novel of the nineteenth century. The style of domestic fiction includes a more leisurely pace, with the narrator’s voice lingering over details of setting, dress, behavior, and, most impor- tantly, emotion. Structurally, Victor’s two detective novels have the same doubled narrative as Poe’s stories, but they also include subplots and nar- ratorial devices that delay the unfolding of the investigation narrative con- siderably. The most striking deviation from Poe’s formula is the way that the narrative ofThe Dead Letteropens in the middle of the investigation, when Richard Redfield is at his lowest point emotionally. He has just dis- covered an important clue in the case of Henry Moreland’s murder, but we readers are entering so fully in medias res that we cannot grasp its signifi- cance in the plot of the investigation. The effect of this opening strategy is to train our attention on the emotional state of the detective and on the psychological effects of investigating a criminal mystery. The plea- sures of reading Victor’s detective fiction are rather different from those             3