![]() ![]() Dupin is a genius eccentric who applies his critical thinking skills to solving crimes, he is surrounded by an incompetent police force, his stories are related by his friend, and his to deduce facts of a person’s life and history from their appearance is seen as something almost supernatural. Poe then delivers a range of narrative elements that will be familiar to modern readers. Instead, to introduce his character Poe gives a lengthy description of what he calls ratiocination, better known as deduction. Indeed, when Poe created him, the word detective would not be coined for another nine years. His short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ introduced the world to the first fictional detective, C. However, the title typically goes to a one-time employee of Burton, Edgar Allen Poe. It should go to E.T.A Hoffmann’s short story ‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi.’ A little remembered short story called ‘The Secret Cell’ by William Evans Burton also deserves a mention. However, it would not be until the 19th century that the figure of the detective emerged in literature. Here, Voltaire helped establish a modern interest, both in literature and in science, of exploring deductive reasoning. The story’s use of combining material traces with logical reasoning directly inspired Voltaire in his 1747 novel Zadig. One particularly interesting example can be found in the Persian fairy tale from the 14th century called 'The Princes of Serendip' which describes three princes using deductive reasoning to guess at the distinctive features of a missing camel. In ancient Greek literature, we find this in the story of Oedipus Rex, where Oedipus interrogates witnesses to find who murdered King Laius while in the Arabic literary tradition it can be seen in a tale within One Thousand and One Nights called ‘The Three Apples’ in which a Caliph orders his vizier to find a murderer within three days or face execution himself. What they do have is a need to uncover the truth in the wake of a crime. These stories may not have many of the traits that we’d be familiar with in detective fiction, indeed there are no detectives, few clues, and not much by way of investigative processes. However its roots can be found in ancient literary traditions across the world. As a genre in and of itself, crime fiction or detective fiction is still relatively new. So, with our own sleuthing skills, it’s worth taking a look back to uncover the traces and clues in literary history that lead us to that famous inhabitant of 221B Baker Street. He did not, as we might expect, emerge out of the mist, fully formed and unprecedented. Even with such early beginnings, Holmes is by no means the first detective in English literature. ![]()
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