C. Auguste Dupin

C. Auguste Dupin is a fictional detective created by Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," widely considered the first detective fiction story.^[1] The character laid the groundwork for fictitious detectives to come, including Sherlock Holmes.

Overview

Dupin lives in Paris with his close friend, the anonymous narrator of the stories. He bears the title Chevalier, meaning that he is a knight in the Légion d'honneur.

He appears in three stories by Poe:

• "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
• "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842)
• "The Purloined Letter" (1844)

Dupin is not actually a professional detective and his motivations change throughout his appearances. He investigates the murders in the Rue Morgue for amusement and to prove the innocence of a falsely accused man. He refuses a reward. However, in "The Purloined Letter", Dupin purposefully pursues a financial reward.^[2]

Poe may have gotten the last name "Dupin" from a character in a series of stories first published Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine in 1828 called "Unpublished passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police."^[3]

Influence

Generally acknowledged as the first detective in fiction, C. Auguste Dupin was the prototype for many that came later, including Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and Hercule Poirot by Agatha Christie.^[4]

Many tropes that would later become commonplace in mystery fiction first appeared in Poe's stories: the eccentric but brilliant detective, the bumbling constabulary, the first-person narration by a close personal friend. Like Sherlock Holmes, Dupin uses his considerable deductive prowess and observation to solve crimes. Poe also portrays the police in an unsympathetic manner as a sort of foil to the detective.^[5] Dupin also initiates the storytelling device where the detective announces his solution and then explains the reasoning leading up to it.^[6]

Other writers

In the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Doctor Watson compares Holmes to Dupin, to which Holmes replies, "No doubt you think you are complimenting me ... In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow,"^[7] despite the fact that the detective was evidently inspired by the other.

Dupin next appears in a series of seven short stories in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine by Michael Harrison in the 1960s. The stories were collected by the Publishers Mycroft & Moran in 1968 as The Exploits of Chevalier Dupin. Included in the collection is an essay by Harrison discussing the real-life inspiration for Poe's Dupin.

The stories are:

• "The Vanished Treasure" (May 1965)
• "The Mystery of the Fulton Documents" (September 1965)
• "The Man in the Blue Spectacles" (May 1966)
• "The Mystery of the Gilded Cheval-Glass" (January 1967)
• "The Fires in the Rue St. Honoré" (January 1967)
• "The Facts in the Case of the Missing Diplomat" (April 1968)

Dupin also had considerable impact on the Agatha Christie character Hercule Poirot, first introduced in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Later in the fictional detectives life, he even writes a book on Edgar Allan Poe in the novel Third Girl (1966).

French writer Gerard Dole has also written a series of Dupin short stories, some of which have been translated into English by Anita Conrade.

The Man Who Was Poe, a juvenile novel by Avi, features Dupin befriending a young boy named Edmund. The two solve mysteries together in Providence, Rhode Island. Dupin is later revealed to be Edgar Allan Poe himself.

Novelist George Egon Hatvary uses Dupin in his novel The Murder of Edgar Allan Poe (1997) as both detective and narrator. In the novel Dupin travels to America to investigate the circumstances of Poe's mysterious death in 1849. In the novel, Dupin and Poe became friends when Poe stayed in Paris circa 1829, and it was Poe who assisted Dupin in the three cases Poe wrote about. Hatvary writes that Dupin bears an exceptional resemblance to Poe, so much so that several people confuse the two on first sight.

Dupin makes a guest appearance in the first two issues of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999) comic book, helping to track down and subdue the monstrous Mr Hyde (who is living secretly in Paris after faking the death described in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde).

The search for the "real Dupin" is at the center of Matthew Pearl's novel The Poe Shadow (2006).

In other media

Dupin (played by Joseph Cotton) is a character in the 1951 Fletcher Markle film The Man with a Cloak. Dupin's true identity is revealed at the end of the film to be Poe himself.

In the comic series "Batman: Confidential," the creation of Batman's crime-solving super-computer which is linked to Interpol, FBI, and CIA databases is introduced. Commonly known as the "Bat Computer," it is originally nicknamed "Dupin," after Batman's "hero."

Notes and references

1. ^ Silverman, Kenneth (1991). Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, Paperback ed., New York: Harper Perennial, 171. ISBN 0060923318. 
2. ^ Whalen, Terance. "Poe and the American Publishing Industry" collected in A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, J. Gerald Kennedy, editor. Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195121503 p. 86
3. ^ Cornelius, Kay. "Biography of Edgar Allan Poe" in Bloom's BioCritiques: Edgar Allan Poe, Harold Bloom, ed. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. p. 31 ISBN 0791061736
4. ^ Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001. pp. 162-3. ISBN 081604161XM
5. ^ Van Leer, David. "Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales" collected in The American Novel: New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, Kenneth Silverman, editor. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0521422434 p. 65
6. ^ Cornelius, Kay. "Biography of Edgar Allan Poe" in Bloom's BioCritiques: Edgar Allan Poe, Harold Bloom, ed. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. p. 33 ISBN 0791061736
7. ^ Conan Doyle, Arthur. "A Study in Scarlet", Chapter 2

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