SOURCE: “Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot and Chatterton's Poet,” in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 315–29.

In the following essay, Koos discusses elements of pastiche and the detective novel genre in Ackroyd's fiction, particularly as found in Chatterton.

Lönnrot thought of himself as a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of an adventurer in him, and even a gamester.

—Jorge Luis Borges “Death and the Compass”

I will now play the Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “Thou Art The Man”

In the never-ending parade of tormented Romantic outcasts, ambitious social climbers, consumptive bohemians, bourgeois liberals, arch criminals (like the real-life Vidocq and the fictive Vautrin), anarchists, decadents, and geniuses in every field, nineteenth-century European culture exhibited its developing cult of the individual. In this burgeoning landscape of real or imagined individualism, a new literary genre took root...