Now it so happened that I had overheard the colloquy between the two cronies, when Mr. Goodfellow had contrived to cajole his host into the promise of a box of Château-Margaux. Upon this hint I acted. I procured a stiff piece of whalebone, thrust it down the throat of the corpse, and deposited the latter in an old wine box — taking care so to double the body up as to double the whalebone with it. In this manner I had to press forcibly upon the lid to keep it down while I secured it with nails; and I anticipated, of course, that as soon as these latter were removed, the top would fly off and the body up.
Having thus arranged the box, I marked, numbered, and addressed it as already told; and then writing a letter in the name of the wine-merchants with whom Mr. Shuttleworthy dealt, I gave instructions to my servant to wheel the box to Mr. Goodfellow’s door, in a barrow, at a given signal from myself. For the words which I intended the corpse to speak, I confidently depended upon my ventriloquial abilities; for their effect, I counted upon the conscience of the murderous wretch.
I believe there is nothing more to be explained. Mr. Pennifeather was released upon the spot, inherited the fortune of his uncle, profited by the lessons of experience, turned over a new leaf, and led happily ever afterwards a new life.
EDITOR’S AFTERNOTE: From the very beginning, “Thou art the man” has been a neglected story. Poe himself did not include it among the twelve stories in the 1845 Tales, although it had appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book a year earlier. (Its first book appearance was in volume two of Griswold’s The works of the late Edgar Allan Poe, (New York, 1850.) A current edition of the “complete stories” of Poe omits it, as do almost all selected volumes; and critical references to Poe’s detective stories usually list only three (the DUPIN stories) or four (including “The gold-bug”).
It’s hard to understand this neglect. Now that you’ve read “Thou art the man” you can see that not only is it most definitely a detective story, but it is also an extraordinary masterpiece of historical anticipation. It contains (as do none of Poe’s other mysteries) the first use of the LSP, or Least Suspected Person device, which alone would make it a landmark; and to top that, it also employs the to this day much rarer device of the LSD, or Least Suspected Detective — a device brilliantly exploited by Q. Patrick, whereby the reader, up to the last moment, has no notion who is the murderer or who is going to denounce him. It contains the first framing of an innocent person by the criminal, the first confession evoked by psychological shock, and (perhaps most significant) the first use of ballistic clues — long before they were in use outside of fiction.
There has been much loose talk about the “unfairness” of “Thou art the man.” The charge was leveled by Howard Haycraft in Murder for pleasure and carelessly repeated by Vincent Starrett (in a forthcoming article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica) and Ellery Queen (in his Bibliography of the detective short story). Mr Queen has since publicly recanted (in an admirable article in Good Housekeeping) and we may hope that the legend is dispelled. Mr Haycraft’s statement that “the all-important factor of the bullet which passed through the horse” is concealed from the reader needs no disproof beyond a rereading of paragraph six: “...a pistol-shot, that had gone clean through and through the poor animal’s chest...”
There’s yet another point of argument about this highly debatable story. Queen refers to “its literary failings” and Sayers to its “unpleasantly flippant... treatment,” and Haycraft goes so far as to call it “by any purely literary standards... one of Poe’s saddest débâcles.” There’s an unanswerable matter of taste involved here; but I think it’s possible to take a different view. Murder in English literature, from the Elizabethan dramatists up through Monk Lewis and Charles Brockden Brown, was a terribly earnest matter, very black-and-red and hair-raising. In “Thou art the man,” Poe discovered that even murder can be treated with casual irony; and this story can be considered the forerunner of such important modern writers (who have also been accused occasionally of unpleasant flippancy) as Edwin Greenwood, Richard Hull and Francis Iles.
No juster judgment could be passed on this story than that of Mr Queen in the article referred to: “Had Poe never written ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter — had he written only ‘Thou Art the Man’ — critics the world over would be mashing one another in the rush to acclaim it literature’s first detective story and a herculean tour de force.”