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What was your first clue?
Published: 4/21/2008 3:30 PM
Last Modified: 4/21/2008 3:30 PM

A blog callled The Rap Sheet -- a wonderful site for those who enjoy crime and mystery fiction in all its forms -- reminded me that Sunday marked the 167th birthday of the detective story.

It was on April 20, 1841, that Graham's Magazine published a tale titled "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," by Edgar Allan Poe. This story about the brutal murders of two women in an apparently inaccessible room, and how the truth of the matter was ascertained by an eccentric genius named Dupin is widely considered the first modern detective story.

It certainly had many of the elements that continue to appear in mystery stories: horrific violence visited upon innocent victims, the oddball detective, the less than brilliant friend who narrates, an impossible crime shown to have a logical (if implausible) reason.

What "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" didn't have was one of those opening sentences that grab the reader's attention.

"The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis," Poe starts out. I remember seeking out this story after watching a bit of one of the films adapted very freely from Poe's tale, and spending what seemed like 15 minutes trying to get my 11-year-old head around that sentence.

It still makes you either slow down, or skip ahead. But Poe's mini-essay on what he called "ratiocination" aside, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" ends up a right ripping yarn -- a heady mix of horror and suspense that bears out the credo of Sherlock Holmes, one of Dupin's many followers: "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Poe would write only two more Dupin stories -- "The Mystery of Marie Roget," which was based on a contemporary American murder, and "The Purloined Letter," maybe the first iteration of the "hide in plain sight" idea.

But those were enough to capture the imagination of thousands of writers and millions of readers, all in pursuit of the answer to same question: whodunit?


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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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