“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in Graham’s Magazine.

Edgar A[llan] Poe

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in Graham’s Magazine.

Philadelphia:

George R. Graham

April, 1841

With a single story, “Poe set for all times one of the two lines on which the detective story has grown—an amateur investigator and his unimaginative narrator” (E. M. Wrong, 1926). Poe’s hero, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, was influenced by French sources including Vidocq’s Memoires, which Poe likely read in the original French. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that “Dupin was, in fact, the literary model for Holmes” (A.E. Murch, 1958). Poe also created different stories around a single sleuth, a pattern still much in use.

From the Collection of Jeffrey Johnson