Monkey shines...
Most everyone looks to Sherlock Holmes when they want to
read a book about solving crime.
Arthur Conan Doyle's stories and his two main characters,
Holmes and Watson, are the most famous, but they are not the first. That honor belongs to C. Auguste Dupin, and
his creator, Edgar Allan Poe. The Murders in the Rue Morgue appeared
within the pages of Graham's Magazine in
April of 1841. Like many classic tales,
stories would often appear in a magazine before being published as a book
(which was expensive) and were often serialized over a number of issues. This particular story appeared in its
entirety. Poe's work was almost
exclusively published in this manner, his stories and poems only appeared in a
few books.
Poe's tale was the true birth of the detective genre, and it
set the pattern for later authors and works.
You can see the pattern and how the story flows between Rue Morgue and A Study In Scarlet, the first
Sherlock Holmes story, and you can see the influence. There is even a nod to Poe when Doyle has
Watson mention Dupin to Holmes...Sherlock, of course, dismisses the French
detective as only he could...making for a really great literary connection.
The story is available here, in it's original
form...starting on p.166: