![]() ![]() In the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders (the Protestant Bible locates this story within the apocrypha), the account told by two witnesses broke down when Daniel cross-examines them. Pfeiffer, have suggested that certain ancient and religious texts bear similarities to what would later be called detective fiction. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Consulting detective Sherlock Holmes examines a suspect's boots in an illustration to the 1891 story " The Boscombe Valley Mystery"ĭetective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective-whether professional, amateur or retired-investigates a crime, often murder. The problem then became one of making these women interesting to the audiences and of introducing characters who would be interested in them and their fate. He never related his two victims to any other character in the story neither did he furnish any good motion-picture reason why they should have been so ferociously slain. The great defect in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’-from the standpoint of hallowed cinema technique-was the absence of a romantic element which Poe did not bother about. ![]() ![]() A contemporary New York Times article explains the reason, which seems in keeping with our modern understanding of screen adaptations: The story was greatly altered from Poe's original. The film itself doesn't actually start until almost 15 minutes in, so you may want to skip ahead. The Murders in the Rue Morgue // Feature Film // 1932Ī short silent film version adaptation of Rue Morgue was released in 1914, but unfortunately there's no trace of it online-which means this 1932 Universal Pictures production is the earliest movie version. If you're interested in a more direct descendant for the story's anniversary, we rounded up a few of the many adaptations you can experience online. In 1944, the story was described as "ne of the most important existing American literary manuscripts" by a New York Times article detailing the sale at auction of Poe's original manuscript for $34,000-double what a Charles Dickens manuscript sold for at the same gallery just the day before.įor these reasons, you can honor The Murders in the Rue Morgue by reading pretty much any detective novel that followed it. Its author may have been modest, but Poe's revolutionary story inspired generations of copycat sleuths-some of whom bore a little too much resemblance to Dupin for fans' comfort, as evidenced by a polemic against Sherlock Holmes sent to the New York Times Saturday Review in 1900. In the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?" Poe himself joked that enthusiastic readers may have confused the brilliance of his fictional sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin, with that of the author himself, writing in a letter to a friend, "I do not mean to say that are not ingenious-but people think them more ingenious than they are-on account of their method and air of method. In the introduction to a recent publication of the story, author Matthew Pearl credits Poe's tale with introducing such "storytelling staples" as "incompetent police, locked rooms where murders occur, an eccentric genius investigator, a naive but forthright narrator." At the time, "detectives" didn't even exist, and many contemporaries compared the story's protagonist to a lawyer. Although earlier writers had penned mystery novels, the trope of a murder being exhaustively analyzed by a perceptive and canny outsider-the "ratiocination," as Poe called it-was all new. ![]() Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue was first published in Graham's magazine 174 years ago today, effectively launching the detective-fiction genre. ![]()
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