DID C. AUGUSTE DUPIN INSPIRE SHERLOCK HOLMES?

IS THE French detective C. Auguste Dupin the spiritual godfather of Sherlock Holmes? Let us set aside for the moment the purely fictional nature of Dupin—he’s a product of Edgar Allan Poe, after all. By contrast, Sherlockians are confident in the belief that Dr. John H. Watson served as chronicler to the real Holmes.

Indeed, there are those who consider Dupin the world’s first detective, even before the term itself was invented. However, I’ve already addressed this claim by noting the Case of the Floating Tweezers, aka the Kabuki Noir drama Kenuki that predates Dupin by 99 years.

At left, Kumedera Danjō, Kabuki sleuth, 1742. At right, a collection of Poe’s Dupin tales, the first of which was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 1841.

Nevertheless, the Chevalier César Auguste Depin had an illustrious, albeit brief, career in crime detection. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 1841, introduced him and his “ratiocination” to the world. Poe stole this French word for “reasoning, argumentation” to describe his sleuth’s mental powers. He also placed the murders on a phony street.

Google Mapping of the Rue Morgue in Paris gives a red herring of Allee Darius Milhaud. On Poe’s freehand attitude of Paris locales, Steven Peithman notes in The annotated tales of Edgar Allan Poe, that he “used this [Boulevard St. Denis], as well as other Paris landmarks in the Dupin tales, with little regard for actual geography.”

And we thought chronicler Watson was occasionally flighty with facts.

In any case, there is no Rue Morgue in Paris. And, if there were such a rue, it wouldn’t necessarily have a morgue on it, because the French word means mortuary, not morgue. What’s more, according to Peithman, “as an adjective it also has the connotation of pompous, arrogant, or haughty.”

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley, 1895.

I won’t give away the plot, and Aubrey Beardsley’s 1895 rendering of an “Ourang-Outang,” as Dupin calls the beast, doesn’t either. The tale has an element of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon about it, in that several witnesses come up with conflicting opinions of what language they heard.

Eliminating the impossible, whatever remains…, (now that’s a phrase to coin), Dupin concludes that no human language was spoken. And, while not exactly brought to justice, at least the murderer is ultimately identified.

Dupin appears in two more Poe tales. The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, 1842, was based on a factual 1841 murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Purloined Letter, 1844, deals with blackmail of an unscrupulous government minister. (Here, Mark Twain might have added, “but I repeat myself.”)

“The Purloined Letter,” 1842. Illustration by Frédéric Lix.

Watson’s literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, acknowledged Poe’s contribution: “Edgar Allan Poe, who, in his carelessly prodigal fashion, threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own.”

On the other hand, when Watson mentions Dupin in “A Study in Scarlet,” Holmes responds, “No doubt you think you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin…. Now in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial.”

The pot calling the kettle noir, n’est pas? ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2016