Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology: Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe's 1st Detective

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Given the popularity and fame of Sherlock Holmes, many might be forgiven for thinking that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sleuth was the first fictional detective to make his mark. However, long before Holmes and Watson were tackling Moriarty or chasing a spectral hound across Dartmoor, Edgar Allan Poe’s creation C. Auguste Dupin was solving cases on the gritty streets of his native Paris. In fact, Poe wrote his stories before the word “detective” was even coined, laying the foundations for the mystery stories that followed, and single-handedly defining the dominant tropes of the detective genre that are still very much in evidence today.

Poe cleverly established the concept of the eccentric genius who relies on deductive reasoning, the sidekick/narrator who serves as the reader’s proxy, and shifted focus from the puzzle to how it is unraveled. Indeed, the impact of Poe’s Dupin cannot be underestimated and the influence is readily apparent in almost every amateur sleuth from the Golden Age of Christie (Hercule Poirot), Allingham (Albert Campion), and Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey), right through to the latest slew of television detectives on shows such as Castle and The Mentalist, as well as the reinvented Sherlock Holmes in both the BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary.

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