Detecting Club

I came to be in the acquaintance of one Mr. Durden in the summer of 18--, the background of whom I intend to be selectively ambiguous about under the auspices of making him more mysterious than he need be. As for myself, I was residing in Paris at this time and there is little more that you must know about me other than that before I met Tyler Durden my life was boring and devoid of imagination. Mr. Durden, one could say, is the man that I wanted to be.
Fortunately, he and I had the very fortuitous occasion to meet each other in a nearly abandoned library. In fact I did not see anyone but myself when I entered yet somehow near the “very rare and very remarkable volume” I sought there stood this man with whom I immediately felt a kinship. Additionally, out of the goodness of his heart he allowed me to rent a house for us both and he even let me pay for all of the furniture we would need. Fortunate for us, I found “a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted… tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion” of the city.
“Our seclusion was perfect.” Nobody knew where we were living. I was able to conceal my location from my former associates and for some reason or another nobody seemed to have heard of or could remember ever knowing of Durden. “We existed within ourselves alone.”
Often we spent the whole day reading and talking to each other. Durden was enamored of the night and every morning we would shut out the sun and consume our chosen literature. I would read articles written by organs in the first person, “I am Joe’s Colon” and Durden would read the works of E.T.A. Hoffman and Voltaire. At night we would carouse arm in arm seeking the sort of excitement that only the night can provide.
It was on these nighttime constitutionals that I became familiarized with a peculiar analytical power in my new friend. He was able to read my mind and even retrace the train of thought that had led me to my reflections. Indeed he was able to combine vastly disparate thoughts and link them together through simple observation of my physicality. His ratiocination followed all sorts of bizarre leaps in thought but it seemed to me that he was privy to my thought process.
Not long after Durden’s strange reasoning feat we came across an article in the evening paper about two murders in the aptly named Rue Morgue. A mother and daughter were found brutally murdered and their apartment in disarray. They lived alone in a room locked from the inside a search party found the bodies of both women one stuffed up the fireplace and the other with her head nearly sliced off. The only clue that really stood out in all of the witness testimonies seemed to be that there was a foreigner in the room speaking a strange tongue. There were many, many, many, many, witnesses who heard a shrill voice and a harsh voice.
The paper went on to outline that one Mr. Bon-Bon had been arrested because someone needed to be arrested and he seemed like an acceptable choice even though there was no evidence against him.
Mr. Durden seemed to read these accounts with great focus and relish until he read about the arrest of Bon-Bon. Once he hit upon that fact he immediately launched into a diatribe against the abilities of the Parisian police force. He decided, with me as collaborator, that we would undertake our own investigation into the events at the Rue Morgue. Apparently all that is necessary for two strange recluses from the edge of town to access a murder scene is to ask permission of the prefect of police.
Oddly enough in our perusal of the murder scene we spoke to no one and no one spoke to us. We simply wandered around examining what we wanted. Durden often picked up and moved things, and at one point I’m pretty sure I saw him put something in his pocket. Crime scene etiquette at its finest.
The next day in some soliloquy or another Durden explained or attempted to explain his solution of the murder. He spoke as if he was speaking to an audience and not to me but it didn’t matter. I felt like I was about to understand what he was saying yet I couldn’t quite fully understand. Also at one point he handed me some guns. His discourse was long and varied but it had something to do with lightning rods, syllabification, clothing, and nails. I wasn’t really sure what he was getting out and then he pulled out a fistful of hair and a book about monkeys. To be honest I sort of lost track of what was going on until a gentleman with a moustache and a club came into the house and we had him locked in with guns pointed at him. He then recounted for me… er… us the story of how his orangutan got loose and broke into the house and, in a charade far less funny than a chimp smoking a cigar, decapitated the old woman before throttling her daughter to death.
It all ended alright though. The sailor made a bunch of money when he sold his orangutan because there are no repercussions for having a crazy, murderous monkey and there is a market for crazy, murderous monkeys. Most important of all was that Durden was right and that is all that really matters.


I think my satire does a good job of showing one of the strange characteristics of the detective genre is the odd character of the narrator. In the Poe stories the narrator does not even get a name he is purely a conduit for the amazing abilities of Dupin. In my satire I also focused on a strange quality the Dupin stories have. I could not find an instance where the Narrator and Dupin were acknowledged as separate people. They seem to always be presented as both being addressed and in much of the dialogue where they both speak it is feasible that one person could be giving both responses. For example at the beginning of “The Purloined Letter” the prefect is about to lay out the story of the letter when the narrator says, “Proceed” and Dupin says, “Or not.” It is feasible that one person spoke both of these lines. While rereading “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” I could not help but see corollaries to Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club.” The dilapidated mansion, the eccentric idealized alter ego, the homoerotic, or perhaps autoerotic, undertones. I think that if the characters of Narrator/Dupin and Narrator/Tyler Durden were more thoroughly compared and analyzed we would see some interesting similarities. I think this is particularly apt given the fight club-esque nature of the new Sherlock Holmes film.
Beyond this I feel that my satire makes light of the seeming ease with which an everyday person could access a crime scene. There seems to be in all of these detective stories a willingness to allow just about anyone a crack at solving the murder. Today it is impossible to get information from the police about anything. Apparently in Victorian England all you needed was to be rather bizarre, or have a substance abuse problem and the chief of police would personally grant you permission to wander around and pick up evidence. I think my satire highlights the fact that in the Victorian detective genre the focus is not on the criminal or really the crime. The focus is the character of the detective. For this reason I sort of glossed over the events of the murder and the clarification of what happened in preference to focusing on the strange character of the detective and the peculiarity of his relationship with the narrator.