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The first guessing detective

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is often cited as the first detective story or first modern murder mystery. It and the two sequels also featuring C. Auguste Dupin as an amateur sleuth, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter", established the genre. Arthur Conan Doyle obviously patterned Sherlock Holmes on Dupin, borrowing not only the protagonist's famous logical method but details of personality and personal habits—not to mention the narrator who purports to be presenting the exploits of his brainy, withdrawn friend to the public.

Of Edgar Allan Poe's three detective stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is in some ways the least accomplished as a story. It's rather cerebral, with Dupin's philosophy on various topics being presented at length. Page after page is devoted to a verbatim reporting of the newspaper account of the bloody murders and then to Dupin's solving of the case, presented mainly through dialogue rather than action.

But in its time the story must have seemed ingenious. It's the first locked-door mystery I can think of and the solution is so unusual that even a century and a half later I cannot think of its equal. Also brilliant is Poe's handling of how the answer is delivered, keeping us guessing, making us think the killer is about to be unveiled and then revealing another twist. Old, old stuff perhaps for the generation of CSI and Law and Order viewers, but this is the story that first taught writers how to do it.

Dupin's method is probably what has seemed most exciting to generations of readers though. It was supposedly a method of logical analysis, by which he could reach incredibly accurate conclusions about many things, including what someone else is thinking. Doyle appropriated it and called it deduction. But in truth the approach presented in these stories is neither analytical nor deductive, as any good philosophy student will tell you. At best it may be inductive reasoning, by which a person generalizes upon particulars. At worst, it's guessing. From scanty information are made big presumptions which might or might not be true, but always turn out in the stories to be correct. What makes this exciting is not that a foolproof method has actually been found by which the mysteries of life can be unravelled, but rather that we enjoy thinking there could be someone, like Dupin or Holmes, who could perform this magic trick.

"The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1843) follows a similar pattern. The police prefect comes calling on Dupin to seek help with a puzzling murder case. The case is detailed in several newspaper accounts, which Dupin critiques to come up with a lead. It's a "far more intricate case" than Rue Morgue, he notes, and the reader easily gets lost. There's also a confusing parallel posed with a real case in New York that supposedly was the basis for this fictional one. The weakest story.

"The Purloined Letter" (1845) is very similar to Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia", preceding it by half a century. It's a classic armchair mystery, in which we don't see our hero do anything besides listen and think and later reveal all to the astonished narrator. Dupin's only bit of sleuthing in the field is recalled by him after the fact. But the story is told less ponderously than the other two (although Poe/Dupin does go on a bit about mathematics) and the characters, established now, lock horns more entertainingly. My favourite of the three stories.

— Eric