The Lock and Key Library: The most interesting stories of all nations: American — Themes and Context

Puzzles Without Detectives

Hawthorne's introduction distinguishes between stories that rely on expert detectives and those where the puzzle resolves through circumstance or remains unexplained. Among the selections, Washington Irving's "Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams" exemplifies the latter: a mysterious stranger appears during a storm, drinks, smokes, and is swept away with his sea chest in a matter of minutes. The tavern patrons, after a brief shock, console themselves with the landlord's observation that the man "came nobody knows whence, and he has gone nobody knows where." The tale then veers into a sailor's yarn about a dead boatswain chasing a ship in his chest—a supernatural coda that deepens the enigma rather than solving it. This structure, where the puzzle is left open or explained away by folklore, contrasts with the analytical resolutions of Poe and Post.

The Detective as Character and Device

Hawthorne notes that after Gaboriau's Lecoq and Conan Doyle's Holmes, the detective became a figure in his own right, but the earlier tradition treated detection as a means to an end. In Poe's "The Gold-Bug," the solution hinges on cryptography and a buried treasure, with the protagonist's methodical reasoning driving the plot. By contrast, Melville Davisson Post's "The Corpus Delicti" (included in the collection) likely employs legal logic rather than a professional sleuth. The anthology thus showcases a spectrum: from Poe's analytical puzzles, where the detective is a genius, to Bierce's "An Heiress from Redhorse" and "The Man and the Snake," where the horror emerges from ambiguous or supernatural causes. Hawthorne's framing encourages readers to compare how each author balances the riddle with the human element.

Recurring Motifs: Storms, Chests, and the Uncanny

Across the excerpts, certain images recur with striking frequency. Storms bracket the stranger's appearance and death in Irving's tale, while the sea chest becomes a symbol of both material wealth and supernatural menace—the landlord jokes about the dead man sailing to Davy Jones's locker, and Peechy Prauw recounts a ghost ship pursued by a corpse in its chest. This blend of the mundane and the eerie echoes Hawthorne's observation that the riddle story often leaves its enigma unexplained. Similarly, in Freeman's "The Shadows on the Wall," the title suggests a visual mystery that may resist rational explanation. Readers attuned to these patterns will find the anthology unified not by a single method of detection but by a shared fascination with the threshold between the known and the inexplicable.

Hawthorne's collection rewards attention to the interplay between narrative structure and puzzle design. Rather than reading for plot resolution alone, consider how each author manipulates the reader's expectation of an answer—whether through a detective's deduction, a supernatural twist, or deliberate ambiguity. The anthology's range, from Poe's cryptographic precision to Irving's folkloric digressions, invites comparison across stories, revealing the diverse strategies American writers employed to unsettle and intrigue.

I keep returning to the moment in Freud’s essay where he describes the uncanny as something that should stay hidden but keeps surfacing—and yesterday, sorting old boxes of notes, I found a paper from university where I'd underlined that same passage in red. It reminded me of sitting in a dim library, rereading Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” and then, in a curious mood, picking up The crimp — Reading Companion. That book, too, understood how a crime leaves a warm fingerprint on ordinary rooms.