Edgar Allan Poe is widely regarded as the inventor of the modern detective story, and “The Man of the Crowd” is one of the first examples of the genre. C. Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective featured in three of Poe’s short stories—“The Murders of the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844)—served as an inspiration for such famous literary detectives as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Acknowledging his debt to Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle once famously said, “Each [of his detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed […]. Where was the detective story before Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” The narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” unlike Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, isn’t technically a detective. Nonetheless, just like other famous literary detectives, he uses his keen powers of observation to deduce hidden truths about people and investigate crimes, using subtle cues in their appearance and mannerisms to draw startlingly accurate conclusions.
While “The Man of the Crowd” bears the outline of a detective story, it has a key difference: while most detective stories end in the resolution of a crime and the unveiling of the criminal behind it, “The Man of the Crowd” features no such neat resolution. The crime not only goes unsolved but also remains hidden, with the narrator reflecting that some “mysteries […] will not suffer themselves to be revealed,” suggesting that not everything can be solved through observation and reason. This ambiguous ending stands in stark contrast to more conventional detective stories, which generally end with the detective getting to the bottom of the crime in question and outlining the analytic steps they took to solve it. This marks the story as a transitional work between Gothic fiction—with its fascination with the unknown and the darker side of human nature—and later detective fiction, which was much more optimistic about the power of rationality to solve that which might otherwise remain unknown.
Poe wrote “The Man of the Crowd” and his C. Auguste Dupin stories shortly after the Industrial Revolution, at a time when many people had recently moved from the countryside to cities to work in new industrial jobs. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people lived in small towns where they would have known their neighbors, but in urban spaces, people increasingly came into contact with strangers they knew nothing about. This led to a climate of increased suspicion and anxiety toward others, as well as an increase in crime—hence the development of and immense popularity of detective fiction.
