At the same time, with spooky overtones, they appealed to nineteenth century readers' preoccupations with the occult. Poe’s formula appealed in the nineteenth century because detective stories promised that reasoning could hold the answer to every question. "Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" he wrote. “The elements Poe invented, such as the reclusive genius detective, his ‘ordinary’ helper, the impossible crime, the incompetent police force, the armchair detection, the locked room mystery, etc., have become firmly embedded in most mystery novels of today,” the historians write.Įven Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock, had to acknowledge Poe's influence. In the Dupin tales, Poe introduced a number of elements, like the friendly narrator, that would remain common to detective stories, write Marković and Oklopčić. Dupin’s roommate, unlike John Watson, remains a nameless “I” throughout the three stories, although he is equally everyday. And the story's narrator, who is literally following the detective around, is his roommate. He’s also unnaturally smart and rational, a kind of superhero who uses powers of thinking to accomplish great feats of crime-solving. Like his literary descendant, Dupin smokes a meerschaum pipe and is generally eccentric. The real police are, of course, absolutely incompetent, like Inspector Lestrade and Scotland Yard are to Holmes. Dupin is a gentleman of leisure who has no need to work and instead keeps himself occupied by using “analysis” to help the real police solve crimes. Poe’s detective, who also appears in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter,” set the stage for that character. The key figure in such a story, then, is the detective. His stories, they write, mix crime with a detective narrative that revolves around solving the puzzle of the “whodunit,” inviting readers to try to solve the puzzle too. Though the roots of the detective story go as far back as Shakespeare, write historians Helena Marković and Biliana Oklopčić, Poe’s tales of rational crime-solving created a genre. The game's afoot, as Holmes might say (Poe didn't give Dupin a nifty catchphrase). In that story, the first locked-room mystery, two women are dead and only a bloody straight razor, two bags of gold coins and some tufts of hair are found in the room with their bodies. Auguste Dupin, he hit on a winning formula.ĭupin was Sherlock Holmes before Sherlock Holmes, a genius detective who first appeared in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” first published on this day in 1841.
When Edgar Allan Poe first introduced the world to C.
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