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“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the Invention of Detective Fiction

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is considered by many literary historians to be the true birth of the detective story as we know it today. While not the first tale of mystery or crime, Edgar Allan Poe created a new genre that focused on the process of solving the crime, treating it as almost a logic puzzle. He called them stories of ratiocination, or tales of reasoning and logical deduction.

The 19th century saw a growing awareness of crime as a major problem in urban centers. In England, the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 created the first modern-style professional police force. In Paris, Eugène François Vidocq, a former criminal, became the first modern criminologist, advising the police on criminal behaviors. These developments in crime prevention inspired Poe to create a new type of crime fighter: the consulting detective. This genius detective uses his deduction skills to see what the police cannot, and after revealing the murderer, explains his logical process to the awe and delight of all. After the immediate success of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, he wrote two more Dupin stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter.”

Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, describes how Poe laid the foundation for the genre in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime (1929). She notes that in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe innovates plot points that would become staples of the detective genre, including a locked room murder scene, an innocent man arrested by an inept police force, and an unexpected and unusual culprit. She also notes that Dupin’s insistence that the murder must have escaped by the window prefigures Sherlock Holmes’s famous line from “The Sign of the Four”: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sayers lauded Poe’s innovation of the admiring sidekick because the character allowed the author to highlight the detective’s cleverness without seeming to praise themself or make their character unlikable. She also saw the role of the sidekick as someone to both stand in for the reader, baffled by the detective’s genius, but also to be less acute than the reader, creating a situation where the reader has the satisfaction of seeing the detective’s train of thought where the sidekick cannot.

Most clearly, Poe had a profound influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, directly inspiring the beloved Sherlock Holmes. Although Doyle writes Sherlock insulting Dupin in “A Study in Scarlet,” Doyle himself expressed great admiration for Poe, stating that he “breathed life” into the detective genre. The send-up of Dupin is actually a reference to how Poe has Dupin mock Vidocq in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In his preface to a 1905 Author’s Edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle praises Poe for establishing such a powerful genre but laments the narrowness of its constraints. In Doyle’s mind, what makes detective fiction, as established by Poe, so powerful is the detective’s mind, meaning that Doyle felt he could only offer so much character development to Holmes. Instead, the mystery and its solution provided the theme, something which he saw Poe as mastering. As Doyle eloquently put it, “On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the footmarks of Poe always in front of him.”

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