[In the following excerpt, Diskin suggests that Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was influenced by Le Fanu's earlier story "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess. "]

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", which first appeared in Graham's Magazine in May 1841, is commonly regarded as the first example of the detective story properly so called. It has, however, I believe, escaped attention that the devisai of the actual mystery to be found in the story, that of a murder committed in a room to which access from outside is apparently impossible, had been anticipated in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's tale, "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess", which appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in November, 1838.¹ The parallels between the stories are, in fact, sufficiently close and sufficiently numerous to allow us to conclude without hesitation that Poe was unconsciously indebted to Le Fanu for the idea. There is, of course, between the stories the all-important difference that, whereas in Poe's the solution of the mystery is arrived at by deductive methods, in Le Fanu's it is discovered only when the perpetrators of the first murder are found engaged in an attempt to commit a second in exactly the same circumstances.

In Le Fanu's tale, the murder is committed when a certain Hugh Tisdall comes on a visit to the house of Sir Arthur T—n, somewhere in County Galway, and, both being strongly addicted to gaming, they spend most of their time shut up together. One morning Tisdall fails to answer the servant's knock on his bedroom door and, when the door, which is locked, is forced open, his dead body is found lying on the bed. From his injuries it is clear that he has been murdered but investigation fails to disclose how the murderer succeeded in entering the room. In the account given of its investigation there are certain similarities to that given of the investigation into the murders in Poe's story. In Poe's account, the investigators arrived at the room "the door of which, being found locked with the key inside, was forced open" and in Le Fanu's, "the inmates of the house being alarmed, the door was forced open. . . . The door had been double locked upon the inside, in evidence of which the key still lay where it had been placed in the lock." Again, Poe says that "on a chair lay a razor besmeared with blood" and the doctor who describes the injuries sustained by Madame L'Espanaye is made to say, though his conjecture is not quite accurate, that "any large, heavy and obtuse weapon would have produced such results". Le Fanu says that "near the bed were found a pair of razors belonging to the murdered man" and, in describing his injuries, mentions that "one deep wound had been inflicted on the temple, apparently with some blunt instrument". He mentions also that "another blow, less effective, probably the first aimed, had grazed the head, removing some of the scalp", and this reminds us that Poe tells of how there were found on the hearth "two or three long and thick tresses of human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots".

Both accounts tell of the efforts made to see whether access to the room could have been gained by means of the chimney or by means of a trap-door. Poe tells of how it was discovered that the "chimneys of all the rooms on the fourth storey were too narrow to admit the passage of a human being" and that "a trap-door on the roof was nailed down very securely—did not appear to have been open for years", while Le Fanu tells of how it was discovered on examination of the chimney that it afforded "in its interior scarcely the possibility of ascent", and that "the walls, ceiling and floor of the room were carefully examined, in order to ascertain whether they contained a trap-door or other concealed mode of entrance—but no such thing appeared". Poe lets it be known, too, that "no secret issues could have escaped the vigilance" of the police. The body of Madame L'Espanaye was discovered in a "small paved yard in the rear of the building" and we learn later that it had been thrown down there from the window of the room. We are told by Le Fanu that the window of the room looked out "upon a kind of courtyard, round which the old buildings stood". Entrance to it could at one time have been gained through a doorway but this had been since built up.

The means by which the murderer or murderers gain access to Tisdall's room is revealed later in the tale. Sir Arthur's niece, who is the narrator of it, goes to live with him on the death of her father and from various indications she comes to suspect one evening that an attempt will be made to murder her in the course of the night. The motive for this lies in Sir Arthur's desire to secure possession of her property which would fall to him after her death under the terms of her father's will. Thus warned, she prevails on her cousin Emily, Sir Arthur's daughter, to stay with her in her room and, while Emily goes to sleep in the bed, she herself keeps watch. There are two doors to the room, one of them communicating with Emily's bedroom, and she discovers after some time that both doors have been locked from the outside. She later sees the form of a man digging a grave in the courtyard below the window. A little later, while ensconced in a corner of the room, she watches with fascinated horror a man whom she recognizes as Sir Arthur's son, Edward, lowering himself slowly to the window-sill, having apparently first attached himself to a rope suspended from the roof. The window frame, "which must have been ingeniously contrived for the purpose", gives way under his pressure and he enters, carrying in his hand a heavy weapon with two blows of which he kills the girl sleeping in the bed. Later, when Sir Arthur enters the room, they seize hold of the body, which is covered with a quilt, and shove it over the window-sill and she hears it "fall heavily on the ground underneath". Grasping a suitable opportunity, she eventually makes her escape from the room and from the house.

The main parallels to be noted between the two stories may now be summarized. We find that in both the body of a murdered person is discovered in a room locked on the inside, that the description of the elimination by investigators of various methods of access to the room is very similar and that it is revealed eventually that the murderer gained access to the room through a window, this window having certain peculiarities of structure. We find also that both a razor and a "blunt instrument" of some kind are mentioned in connexion with the murders in both stories and that in both also the body of a murdered person is thrown out of an upstairs window into a yard below. It may be added that the room in which the heroine of Le Fanu's tale sleeps and the room where the body of Mademoiselle L'Espanaye is discovered both communicate with an adjoining room.

In Le Fanu's account of how the room in which Tisdall's body was found was apparently sealed off from outside access there was one slight weakness which Poe hastened to eliminate in his own story. Le Fanu mentions that the window was closed but adds that it was "not secured on the interior". Poe makes sure, however, not only that "the windows, both of the back and front room, were down and firmly fastened from within" but that the windows of the back room should have the appearance of being nailed down as well and to the planning of all this he devotes a good deal of ingenuity. As has been mentioned earlier, Le Fanu, having created a problem, failed to go on and solve it by deductive processes. But he did take one step along the road and thereby, in all probability, provided Poe with a valuable hint. At the inquest on Tisdall, a shrewd member of the jury suggested that "two persons had probably been engaged in the attempt, one watching by the sleeping man and ready to strike him in case of his awakening suddenly, while the other was procuring the razors and employed in making the fatal gash so as to make it appear to have been the act of the murdered man himself". It does not minimize the credit due to Poe as the inventor of the detective story to point out that he may have derived hints from a variety of sources. Accounts of investigations into crime where the police or magistrates make deductions from the available clues were certainly not unknown in fiction before his time. There is an interesting example of this in Ch. X of Scott's Guy Mannering which describes the Sheriff's investigations into the murder of Frank Kennedy.

We can, I believe, trace the influence of Poe's reading at various points elsewhere in the story. It was pointed out, a good many years ago, that he owed something to the account of the orang-outang in Scott's Count Robert of Paris.² For another detail he drew on recollections of an earlier story by Le Fanu entitled "The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh" which also appeared in the Dublin University Magazine? We find in the story that Dupin shows the narrator a tuft of hair which he had disentangled "from the rigidly clutched fingers of Madame L'Espanaye" and the narrator quickly points out that it was "no human hair". Now, in Le Fanu's tale, when the dead body of Sir Robert is discovered at the foot of a precipice, it is noticed that in the fingers of his right hand there "was clutched, with the fixedness, of death, a long lock of coarse sooty hair—the only direct circumstantial evidence of the presence of a second person".⁴ It is to be gathered from the tradition similar to the Faustus legend that the tale incorporates that, in a sense, this was no human hair either and that Sir Robert met his death through diabolical agency. It may be true, as has been claimed, that in his detective stories Poe adhered to the "Fair-Play Rule", which demands that all the clues should be placed before the reader before any deductions are made by the detective.⁵ But in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Dupin certainly does not reveal his clues in the order of their importance and the obvious clue as to the nature of the murderer provided by the hair is held back by him for as long as possible.

Earlier in the story we meet with an episode which treats of how Dupin is able to tell the narrator what he is thinking about, having traced the progress of his mind through a series of associations commencing with an encounter with a fruiterer in the street and ending with thoughts on a cobbler who has turned actor. He is assisted in this by close observation of the narrator's looks and actions. Part of the inspiration of this episode probably came from a passage in J. C. Mangan's tale, "The Thirty Flasks", also published in the Dublin University Magazine,⁶ which describes the train of associations that runs through the hero's mind and which was suggested in the first place by "a glimpse of a pair of sandalled feet" as their possessor hurries past. The sequence commences with "Sandals—feet—dances—Bigottini—the opera—ballets—balls—Brussels—Waterloo—Childe Harold—Byron" and concludes with "boot-maker's—his (Basil's) own bootmaker's exorbitant bill". Both trains of association, it should be noticed, are started off by an encounter in the street and the concluding item is, in the one case, connected with a cobbler and, in the other, with a bootmaker. Evidently here again we catch Poe unconsciously adapting and transforming an idea derived from his reading.

Notes

¹ xii, 502-519.

² J. R. Moore, "Poe, Scott and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'", American Literature, viii (1936), 52-58.

³ xi (March, 1838), 313-324.

⁴ Ibid., 317.

⁵ Dorothy L. Sayers, ed., Tales of Detection (London, 1936), vii.

⁶ xii (October and December, 1838), 408-424, 666-686.