This Day in History: What many consider the first detective story, Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, was published on this day in 1841. Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, was french and all of Poe's detective fiction was set in France. Poe marinated himself in french literature, and his detective works may have been influenced by Zadig, a story by the philosopher Voltaire. Voltaire's Zadig was a philosopher in ancient Babylonia who had brilliant powers of deduction. Auguste Dupin would later go on to partly inspire Arthur Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes.
There is a Golden Age of detective fiction, but that era excludes both Holmes and Dupin. That Golden Age was in the 1920's and 1930's, with authors such as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Edmund Crispin, Dorothy L. Sayers, Georges Simenon (Maigret), and Monsignor Ronald A. Knox who also translated a version of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate and the Septuagint.
See also The 300 Oldest Murder Mystery and Crime Books & Stories on DVDrom
For a list of all of my disks and ebooks click here
For a list of all of my disks and ebooks click here
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