Page 46 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Edgar Allen Poe: The Murders on the Rue Morgue 1841
First published as a short story in Graham’s Magazine, then in book form, this is widely reckoned to be the first detective story - the book that established the detective genre, paving the way for the other famous contributions in this genre by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes series beginning 1887) and Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White 1859, The Moonstone 1868). And of course there are precedents for crime-related mysteries in Classical texts, and in both Arabic and Chinese literature. Poe wrote other books following Rue Morgue - based on the exploits of his detective C. Auguste Dupin.
The huge surge of literacy that characterises the 19th century catalysed an entirely new publishing phenomenon - responding to rapidly growing markets in the ‘lower middle’ and ‘working’ classes - a stratum of society in the UK previously not considered as a viable market for literature. And of course the literature itself changed and fragmented into a variety of forms and content genres to address this new ‘mass’ market. Crime fiction grew to become - in the 1920s and 1930s, possibly the largest literary genre, but others - like the Western, Science Fiction, Adventure, Horror, Romance and Period Dramas - emerged over this same period, and as Jay David Bolter and others have pointed out, were adopted and remediated through the newly emerging mass media of the 20th century - the radio, the comics, magazines, television. So, beginning with the penny dreadfuls and dime novels of the mid-19th century, we move on to the pulp fiction boom, lasting well into the second half of the 20th century. Alongside content remediation and genre innovation, came the innovations - and remediations - of formal structures - of how the content is published. Rue Morgue’s detective, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, began a process that was developed by Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and a huge wave of 20th century crime-fiction writers.
What I like about the Detective genre is that implies a more interactive, collaborative role for the reader; and later, in Dennis Wheatley and J.C. Links famous Murder off Miami (1936) this is put into practice by presenting the reader with a multi-media dossier on the crime to be solved, replete with bagged artefacts from the scene of the crime, depositions of witnesses, photographs and maps (etc) - a precedent for games situated in this genre - such as Take Two Interactive’s Black Dahlia (1998).