The Private Detective in Literature: C. Auguste Dupin (Edgar Allan Poe)

The Roots of the Detective Story

Since the profession came into being, the private detective has been a popular subject in literature. Countless types of detectives have been imagined by writers over the past two centuries. Many of them found their way early into film or television, so it is easy to forget that, in most cases, the root of every well-known detective lies in crime fiction: whether the classic (Sherlock Holmes) or the eccentric (Hercule Poirot), the hard-boiled detectives of the American interwar era or the down-to-earth contemporary figures such as Wilsberg from Münster — private detectives remain extremely popular among crime readers worldwide, and our investigators at Kurtz Detective Agency Duisburg naturally hold the literary forebears in the highest regard. Frankly, many detective agencies worldwide might not exist in their present form if the private detective had not enriched literature and the public imagination for more than 150 years. Today we therefore turn to the roots of the detective story — and, contrary to common assumption, it does not begin with Sherlock Holmes.

Detectives Become Famous in Reality and in Fiction Almost Simultaneously

Historically, the real-world profession of private detective was accompanied almost immediately by a literary counterpart (see our feature “The Detective through the Ages: Eugène François Vidocq” for background). The founder of the first detective office (1833), Eugène François Vidocq, clearly inspired numerous literary figures among French authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Yet the author who introduced the classic detective story to the world was — surprisingly — an American.

Edgar Allan Poe: Inventor of the Detective Story

There had of course been earlier tales in which a mysterious offence was clarified by an unofficial intermediary, but never in the form of the private detective as we know him today. Prior protagonists who solved crimes were usually outsiders — for example the court poet in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi — and solving crimes was rarely their passion or profession; they were dragged into events by circumstance. This changed in 1841 when “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first appeared in Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia. Its author was none other than Edgar Allan Poe, already famed for gothic tales such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and widely regarded in literary studies as a father of the short story and the macabre tale.

 

It is often forgotten that the detective story as we now know it stems from him; the credit is too frequently given to Poe’s English successors. Poe’s protagonist C. Auguste Dupin already displays many of the qualities that, forty-five years later, would characterise his more famous colleague Sherlock Holmes: the tale is told in the first person by Dupin’s unnamed assistant and roommate (a device Arthur Conan Doyle adopts for Dr Watson); Dupin is analytical, well read, highly observant, fascinated by puzzles and mysteries, and able by means of intellect alone to triumph over crime.

 

Poe himself called his then-novel mode of storytelling “ratiocination” — the solving of puzzles by reason alone — in other words, the art of deduction that later made Sherlock Holmes famous. There are other parallels: Dupin effectively operates as a professional sleuth because he is repeatedly consulted by the police (represented by a high-ranking officer “G”) — just as Holmes later works alongside Inspectors such as Lestrade at Scotland Yard.

Clear Intertextuality between Holmes and Dupin

Dupin assists the Paris police in three short stories in total (besides “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) these are “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844)). His solutions are original and repeatedly allow the police to identify the true culprit — in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the perpetrator turns out, surprisingly, to be an orangutan, whom Dupin establishes as responsible.

 

Arthur Conan Doyle never hid his admiration for Poe and explicitly references Dupin. In Dr Watson’s first meeting with Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet” (1887) Watson remarks, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin. Such types have hitherto only existed for me in the pages of romance.” Holmes, in typical Doylean irony, replies that Dupin seems to him “of no great account” and that his methods are “showy and artificial.” Perhaps this is Doyle’s playful acknowledgement of a passage in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in which Poe has Dupin speak dismissively of his real-world model Vidocq as “a man… clever at guessing and inference” but lacking “trained thought”.

Thinking and Methodology of Early Literary Models Lastingly Shaped the Profession

The analytical approach and methods presented by these early literary prototypes have had a lasting effect on the real-world profession of detective. Our investigators at Kurtz Detective Agency Duisburg do not cultivate the eccentric-loner stereotype; we emphasise teamwork. Nonetheless, analytic thinking and a methodical approach to bringing a case to a successful conclusion remain central to our everyday practice — and, to be honest, we are all rather relieved when the culprit is not an orangutan: how would one explain that to a client?

 

By the way, Poe never uses the term “detective”, since it had not yet been coined in that sense; it was Doyle who later described his hero as a “consulting detective” — a topic for a subsequent instalment.

Author: Gerrit Koehler

 

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