The Pale Blue Eye Explores How Edgar Allan Poe Was Author of the First Detective Story

The Armchair Detective Rests His Case

C. Auguste Dupin is also literature’s first amateur sleuth. In contrast to the film’s Augustus Landor, who is an ex-policeman with an impressive official success record, Poe’s intrepid investigator is not a detective, just a man with a reputation for possessing an acutely analytical mind who is asked to scrutinize crime scenes, and permitted to freely investigate. Dupin is a reclusive genius, but he has connections with people involved with the cases. He has no professional stake in their solution, it is a favor to him to pass the time.

In Poe’s stories, Dupin is a gentleman, mysteriously wealthy. He doesn’t need to work and lives a life of leisure. He is an amateur poet, preternaturally nocturnal, and works by candlelight. He likes to relax over puzzling pieces of nefarious transgressions while puffing on a meerschaum pipe. This is the same brand puffed on by the investigator who noted the trickery specifically inherent in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.”

In the last of the Dupin trilogy stories, “The Purloined Letter,” personal revenge is an added motivation for solving the crime. The investigator gambles his entire reputation over the case but keeps a close count of the cards. The fictional Dupin analyzes crimes based on external facts, but also has a taste for larceny.

The Real-Life Detective

Dupin is based on the real life criminal-turned-French Minister of Police François-Eugène Vidocq, who founded France’s national police detective organization Sûreté under Napoleon. Vidocqu owed his success to his experience in the criminal underground in Arras, Paris. Dupin shows off similarly illicit skills in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” duping the authorities and public alike in order to rest his case, and be celebrated for it. Vidocq was also a social butterfly, friendly with authors Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Honoré de Balzac, and a staple of local news and gossip.

Vidocq left police work to run a paper mill, hiring former convicts for labor, but didn’t have a head for business and returned as chief of the detective department under King Louis-Philippe. After being dismissed in 1832 under accusations of organizing a robbery, Vidoqu formed his own private investigative force. The authorities of the time squashed its very existence, but it has come to be known as the prototype of modern private detective agencies.

In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin calls Vidocq “a good guesser.” In the first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), Holmes similarly dismisses the French detective’s fictional adaptation. “In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow,” Holmes tells Dr. Watson. “He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appears to imagine.”