According to the Writers Almanac: It was on this day in 1841 that the first detective story was published: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, byEdgar Allan Poe (books by this author). In the story, C. August Dupin reads about the murder of a mother and daughter in a Paris street. The police are baffled, and Dupin decides to offer up his services. He finds a hair at the crime scene that he realizes does not belong to a human, and eventually he pieces together enough evidence to solve the case: The murder was committed by an orangutan who had been held in captivity by a sailor and who murdered the first woman with a straight razor and the second by strangling her. The story is narrated not by Dupin but by his slightly less competent sidekick, just as Dr. Watson would narrate the Sherlock Holmes stories that first appeared 45 years later. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Holmes stories, said, Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it? Poe wrote two more stories featuring the detective C. August Dupin, although the word detective did not exist yet: The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844).
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 17:46:59 +0000
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