Though mystery may have roots going back to the Greek Oedipus and the Hebrew Daniel, it's not inappropriate to credit Edgar Allan Poe with creating the genre. Poe was so deeply invested in working out his personal epistemology, his quest for the meaning of knowledge. that he conceived of both the "riddle" and the "enigma" versions of the genre.
In the earlier essay, I used this definition of riddle:
a "riddle" is a perplexing arrangement of words that does (as Macmillan says) does finally have some rational or quasi-rational answer
This would aptly describe the "rational pole" of the mystery-genre, as represented by the stories of the so-called "first detective," C. Auguste Dupin. In each of his three tales, Dupin is confronted by some bizarre phenomenon that no one else can explain, but which he alone can resolve through his analytical power. The first of the Dupin stories, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," devotes its first four paragraphs to a discussion of said power, starting out by characterizing the genius of people like the story's main character, who will be able to entangle "enigmas," "conundrums," and "hieroglyphics" with equal acumen:
THE mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension pr�ternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.
However, though Dupin never meets a problem he cannot solve, other Poe characters do so. In 1844, the same year that Poe wrote the last Dupin story, he also completed the less-heralded stand-alone story, "The Oblong Box," which I believe ends with an "enigma," defined earlier as:
"a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation"
Since the events of "Oblong Box" aren't as well as known as those of "Rue Morgue," I'll summarize the former's action. Poe's unnamed narrator takes a sea-cruise, and finds that the guests include his former fellow college-student Wyatt, his wife, and his two sisters, who also bring aboard the ship a mysterious "oblong box." The extremely nosy narrator observes some odd discontinuities in the behavior of Wyatt and his fellow travelers, and wonders if it somehow bears on the unseen contents of the box. While the unnamed fellow doesn't come to the correct conclusion, the resolution of the mystery-- one of the few in mystery-fiction that doesn't involve a crime as such-- is explained at the end. And yet, despite the (accidental) solution of the mystery, the nature of Wyatt's relationship to the oblong box is one that remains enigmatic even after the basic situation is understood-- with the result that the narrator is haunted by the disclosures, as C. Auguste Dupin never is, as the story's closing lines relate:
My own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament. But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night. There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will. There is an hysterical laugh which will forever ring within my ears.
I would say, then, that all mysteries after Poe tend to follow either the rational model of the Dupin stories, where the detective's acumen resolves all the problems, and or the irrational model of "The Oblong Box," where even the solution of a given problem merely generates a sense of greater mystery, often of some mystery that remains insoluble.
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