C. Auguste Dupin implies "duping" or deception, a skill Dupin shows off in "The Purloined Letter." Detective fiction, however, had no real precedent and the word "detective" had not yet been coined when Poe first introduced Dupin. The closest example in fiction is Voltaire's "Zadig" (1748), in which the main character performs similar feats of analysis, themselves borrowed from "The Three Princes of Serendip", an Italian rendition of Amir Khusrau's Hasht Bihisht. In writing the series of Dupin tales, Poe capitalized on contemporary popular interest. His use of an orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was inspired by the popular reaction
C. Auguste Dupin 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, Volume I" (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"). Dupin teams up with the Count of Monte-Cristo to fight "Les Habits Noirs" in the story "The Kind-Hearted Torturer" by John Peel published in the anthology Tales of the Shadowmen, Volume 1 (2005) The search for the "real