FROM THE CLASSICS SHELF
Murders in the Rue Morgue: Poe Creates Prototype of the Modern Detective Story
“To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.” — Edgar Allen Poe
I was in sixth or seventh grade when I acquired and first read Edgar Allen Poe: The Complete Stories and Poems . I had been into horror films as well as thrillers at the time and was drawn naturally to stories like The Pit & the Pendulum, The Black Cat, Tell-Tale Heart, and Masque of the Red Death. I didn’t, as yet, know the extent of Poe’s literary influence. I only knew that I found the stories to be compelling.
A half century has passed since then and after having recently read of Poe’s influence I picked up a copy of several Poe mysteries featuring C. Auguste Dupin, the first of these being “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Very early in the story I recognized the first outlines of a pattern that every reader of mysteries will readily grasp, the format of our modern classic detective stories. Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot parade before us, but it was Poe who invented the prototype.
Each detective hero is introduced in a similar manner by means of some incident in which we observe his or her masterful powers of observation and deduction. In the case of Poe’s Dupin, he deduces that the narrator…
