Prosser: Poe and Doyle The Genius Detective Ashleigh Prosser,
The University of Western Australia Abstract. ”The Genius
Detective” is a discussion of the representation of Edgar Allan
Poe’s C. Augustus Dupin in The Three Tales of Ratiocination and
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes as first introduced in A
Study in Scarlet as the “genius detective”, based on the
methodology outlined by Franco Moretti in his essay “Clues” in
Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. In
Franco Moretti’s essay “Clues”, Moretti discusses what has now
become an accepted convention of the genre of detective fiction,
that the figure of the ‘genius detective’ is not “moved by pity
for the victim, by moral or material horror at the crime,”
rather, he is driven to detection by the crime’s “uniqueness and
its mystery” which he terms its “cultural quality.”(Moretti,
135) In Moretti’s opinion, Doyle’s ‘genius detective’ Sherlock
Holmes is considered to be the best representative of the
‘genius detective’ archetype in