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"From the very beginning women writers have been of fundamental importance to the mystery genre and these highly entertaining works by two of the founding 'mothers' of the American mystery novel demonstrate why. Times may have changed since these books were first published, but good reading never goes out of fashion."--Dean James, coauthor of "By a Woman's Hand: A Guide to Mystery Fiction by Women "and manager of Murder by the Book (Houston, Texas)

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The dead letter, & The figure eight

Duke University Press

Contents

Introduction............................................................1The Dead Letter: An American Romance....................................11The Figure Eight; or, The Mystery of Meredith Place.....................209

Introduction

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 inventor 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 1920s, 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 1860s and the 1920s 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 of The Dead Letter in 1867 and The Figure Eight in 1869. 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 influenced 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 writing, the domestic novel of the 1850s, produced a style we can call domestic 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 1831, 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 successful in several genres for both children and adults: the western, the romance, 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 of Beadle's Home and Beadle's Monthly, in which The Dead Letter first appeared in serial form in 1866. Victor was best known for an abolitionist dime novel (which she published under her own name) called Maum Guinea and Her Plantation "Children" (1861). Alongside this highly productive career in letters, she raised nine children. In 1876 she published Passing the Portal, a book that purports to be an autobiography but is quite frustrating to would-be biographers since it conforms remarkably closely to the conventions of domestic 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 solution to the limitations of the literary market was similar to that of Alcott, whose numerous pseudonymous thrillers have only recently been reconnected 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 position 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 commercial 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 striking reflections of the historical and cultural concerns of the immediate postbellum period.

Victor wrote The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight under the pseudonym of Seeley Regester. In each, she takes the apparatus of the detective story Poe set forth in the "tales of ratiocination" of the 1840s (namely, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Mystery of Marie Rogt," and "The Gold-Bug") and expands it into a full-length novelistic 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 1865 thriller "V. V., or Plots and Counterplots," 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 detective in a starring role. It commences with the discovery of a corpse or corpses and proceeds through the gathering of physical evidence, interviewing of witnesses, identification of suspects, and revelation of the murderer. Below the surface of the novel is another story-the story of the murder-including the motives, methods, coverup, and subsequent murders 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 detective story, for all its structural sophistication, as a concentrated form. Victor brought a very different aesthetic to the story of criminal investigation, that of the popular women's novel of the nineteenth century. The style of domestic fiction includes amore leisurely pace, with the narrator's voice lingering over details of setting, dress, behavior, and, most importantly, emotion. Structurally, Victor's two detective novels have the same doubled narrative as Poe's stories, but they also include subplots and narratorial devices that delay...