Thank You, Mr. Poe
55
rye; / Four and twenty blackbirds, / Baked in a pie” (563). Job, like the OurangOutang, was just mimicking behaviors he had learned through his
extraordinarily limited socialization.
The other common point worth mentioning in comparing these two
murderers is their strength. The strength of each primitive killer was noted by
the detective of each scenario and was a trademark of each situation. In
“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the ape’s strength allowed him to strangle the
younger woman and brutally shove her body up the chinmey and then decapitate
the older woman using only a straight razor (Poe 283). Job’s strength, having
been developed by climbing the walls of underground caverns, primate-like, for
50 years, was evident at each crime scene by the brutal strength used to break
the necks of his victims.
Thus far, I have discussed how Preston and Child directly reference earlier
works of Poe and how they borrow specific elements in order to create a similar
sense of horror in their novels; in addition, Preston and Child also borrow
elements of mystery from Poe’s legacy to contribute to the mysterious, detective
natures of their stories. One source claims “. .. one recent list [numbers] thirtytwo separate elements which Poe contributed to later detective fiction: amateur
detective, locked-room mystery, ballistics, blood tests” (Panek 31); however, the
two primary elements which Poe is credited for creating in the detective genre
that are also evident in the Pendergast mysteries that I will discuss include the
locked room mystery (Anderson 14) and invention of the detective sidekick
(Anderson 14).
Poe first demonstrated the locked-room mystery with “The Murders in the
Rue Morgue” in which he had the monkey escape through a window. The room
was seemingly sealed, but upon Detective Dupin’s examination of the only
possible exits, he discovered that one of the nails sealing the window shut had
been broken in half Because this nail was broken, the Ourang-Outang had been
able to open the window, escape through it, and close the window behind him
again, not disturbing the broken nail (298-299). This locked-room style of
mystery was used in two of the three Preston and Child novels. Still Life with
Crows and Brimstone; while a portion the mystery presented in each story is
definitely classifiable as a locked-room mystery, Preston and Child take Poe’s
original idea and moderni ze it.
In Still Life with Crows, the locked room is actually a locked underground
cavern. Because it is a tourist destination, the owner of the cave has installed and
keeps padlocked a heavy door leading to the innermost caverns, which turn out
to be the place where the entire mystery of the story is solved. Detective
Pendergast, much in the spirit of Dupin, deduces that there has to be another
way into the caverns since the main door is padlocked, which of course there is.
He discovers the secret entrance with the use of GPS and aerial maps which aid
him in the ultimately murder-solving discovery (427).
Brimstone's locked-door mystery has also been adapted to make sense in
this modem era of technology. Many of the victims in Brimstone were killed by