9. Myth: Edgar Allan Poe Just Stuck to Poetry and Tales of Macabre Origin
Fact: Poe was actually the biggest inspiration for modern-day mystery novels.
Edgar Allan Poe is known for his horror stories and the poem The Raven, as well as other works of poetry and tales of the macabre. He is also widely associated with Baltimore, where he died and was buried, though he lived most of his life in other cities, including New York and Richmond, Virginia. What is less well known is that the modern detective story as a genre of fiction arose from his fertile creative mind. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, credited Poe for creating detective fiction, as well as noting the American writer’s significant contributions to the genre of science fiction. “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” wrote Doyle.
Poe created the character, C. Auguste Dupin, in his story The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, before the word detective was coined. The character appears in two other works, The Purloined Letter and The Mystery of Marie Roget. The character uses deductive reasoning and creative imagination to solve the mysteries put before him, traits reflected in Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Sam Spade, and a myriad of fictional detectives which followed. Poe wrote of his character “…he makes in silence a host of observations and inferences,” an observation which describes most of the fictional detectives which followed in his wake.