The first detective 'mysteries' are accorded to the great gothic writer Edgar Allen Poe and the artwork his body of work has inspired is similarly inspiring for our enterprise.
Get past the fandom, and some of Poe's short stories can be found here: http://www.poestories.com/
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: TEXTURES OF THE CITY
Certainly an interesting character both creatively, socially and politically, Baudelaire was influenced by Poe and become a translator of his work into French because he felt a resonance with Poe's themes and line of thought. Baudelaire was sick of romanticism and his body of work was influential in changing the direction of French literature.
He wrote about the darkness inside all men, the fleeting nature of the city in a tight sharp prose (something echoed in some ways by writers like Chandler and other noir and hard boiled writers).
He was scandulous. He smoked opium and was interesting in mind opening experiences. He loved raves. Or the 19th Century equivalent.
On Pleasure: "Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."
On Marriage: "Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage."
His seminal work of poetry: the Flowers of Evil: http://fleursdumal.org/1857-table-of-contents
Nice echo to the famous noir, Touch of Evil.
Baudelaire continues to influence not because of his flowery madness and excess of love and sex but of his descriptions of the city, especially at night, and the coming of 'modernity'.
His poetry is modern because it rejects that which there is no evidence for.
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/VoyageToModernitypage.htm
What else does Baudelaire take from Dante? His vision of Hell, yes: but more importantly his moral centre. No vision of the Inferno, such as Dante and Baudelaire possess, is meaningful without extreme sensitivity to pain, to harm, to deathliness, to betrayal, to personal failing, pride, lust, to all the sins and vices, anxieties and fevers. Baudelaire’s hell lacks the feeling of divine retribution and punishment that Dante’s expresses, it is a hell of reality, a hell of the human condition, imposed perhaps, or accidental perhaps, but not infused with divine meaning. If Baudelaire too is a Catholic, he is an immensely strange one. Yet the moral centre is clear. All Baudelaire’s Satanism, his flowers of evil, his toying with vice, sin, the consciousness of the infamous, are trappings, never his essence. His essence is always the search for incorruptible love, for true meaning, for an endless ecstasy of feeling and sensation, for a world of delight that does not exist for us except momentarily, for solace and consolation, for a defence against time, mortality, betrayal, and disappointment.
This next quote is interesting from the point of view of how characters in noir are often punishing themselves, knowingly, as a rejection of a boring life, the crushing 'ennui' of modern life. Look at the list of vices too; obsession, infatuation, his charting of the dark labrinyths people wander in their lives is actually charitable, because it is real, and therefore illuminating.
Look at all that effing writing. Prize to anyone who has read down to here.
Baudelaire’s sinners are caught in the meshes of obsession and infatuation, their vices are repetitions, almost a definition of sin for Baudelaire as it was for Goethe ‘that which we cannot stop doing’, that which we cannot evade. His sinners are gamblers, petty criminals, faithless whores, self-tormenters, sexual deviants, religious flagellants those who are always trying to satisfy a deeper restlessness through the mechanisms of a surface anxiety or addiction. And they are those with whom we have empathy, because they are, as we are, says Baudelaire, in search of an artificial paradise, a haven, a harbour, blessed by Venus, or Fortuna, by ‘Madonna, Muse or Guardian Angel.’
This guy is a great writer. Bit highfautin for some, but his understanding of why a character becomes a character and how the time can sometimes make the man is revelatory for understanding Horatio's character. Or any great character.
There are reasons for Baudelaire’s alienation from his world, and his search for other worlds, that are attributable to his private life, his childhood, his sensibility. But they are only the pre-dispositions that enable his art and thought: they do not in any way determine or exhaust them. When a world-shattering change takes place in society, intellectual life, and spirituality, a fracturing of old values and old relationships, then it should be no surprise if it is those individuals whose temperament, intellect and early life mirrors aspects of that change, and sensitises them to it, who are most likely to take up the task of understanding and confronting it.
The city as Baudelaire saw it:
What more does Baudelaire take from Dante? He takes his vision of hell as a city, the city as hell. For Baudelaire that involves its varied aspects of humanity crammed into a tiny space, its panoply of human behaviour, its existence almost as a living being in its own right, a seething ant-heap, its potential callousness, indifference, insanity, its juxtaposition of human states, its conflict of extremes, wealth with poverty, beauty with ugliness, truth with deceit, kindness with crime, love with hatred.
The city is humanity objectified, made the instrument of the market, all the markets where we buy and sell things and ourselves. The city is an ogre, a monster, but also a thing of veils and enchantments, a seductive whore, a theatre, a landscape of arcades and canals, buildings and streets, vehicles and passers-by. Because there is no Mount of Purgatory and no Paradise for Baudelaire except the artificial paradises of his imagination, then the city is, more potently, Hell. There is no City of the Church, no City of God, only the city of Mankind, of Reality. Those relationships that do exist he views within its context. Escape from the city, to search for new possibilities, hopes of relationship, can only be by a voyage of mind or body, even though all voyages disappoint, except perhaps (a vague and unreal one perhaps) the last voyage with Captain Death. The city of hell is Paris in reality, as for Dante it was Florence transposed. But not only are all the sins and vices of hell there, so is the flattened purgatory, the collapsed mountain, because after all in purgatory Dante says that we re-visit the sins of hell in expiation, and what difference is there in Baudelaire’s essentially godless world between suffering the sin, and suffering it again in repetition, in thought, in remorse, in purgation?
Man's position within an 'intention-less' universe is the reason for the scientific method and the basis in some ways for the popularity of a detective, who has an honest appreciation of the depths of the human mind, using facts and knowledge to pick a way through the labrinyth rather than waiting for movement from some creator spirit to make all things right with a sweep of a mighty hand.
Secondly, the new, though often chilling, comprehension of our biological and social selves within the context of an intention-less universe devoid of gods and demons, open to exploration through the scientific method, a universe which, while still ultimately mysterious to us in its being and its organisation, is no longer some artefact of a strange deity, or the whim of a blind creator.
It sounds gloomy, but really Baudeliare was a moralist too. He challenged and reflected the times because he felt, acutely, a relationship with nature, and wider still, the possibilities of what man could be to himself, with one another and with the earth around, what he saw instead though was a wasteland of broken dreams, cheap vulgarity and desperation.
Enter Horatio Wells. The optimist's pesimist.
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