If one accedes to the general view that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is the first detective story, it's interesting that it's also a prime example of an *uncanny* phenomenality, one in which the author conjures forth an irreducible strangeness, despite the fact that the author tries to stay within the bounds of materailistic causality, where no transgressions of natural law take place. The source of the strangeness is, as most readers will know, the culprit in a Parisian double-murder, whom detective Dupin flawlessly deduces to be an out-of-control ourang-outan.
I have to imagine that generations of Poe readers have probably to vault over the first four or so pages of the story, in which Poe subjects readers to a philosophical lecture on his theories of "ideality," by which he seems to mean something like Kant's idea of reason. This lecture in turn leads one to a prelude in which Dupin first demonstrates his peerless ability to divine his roommate's inward thoughts by external observation of the man's physical responses and verbal communicaitons. It's almost beyond question that Conan Doyle copied aspects of Sherlock Holmes from Dupin, even if Dupin was not the only influence on Holmes. But it seems Poe, unlike Doyle, really considered the "mind-reading" trick a bagatelle, since Dupin doesn't even make a point of emphasizing this skill in his last two stories.
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