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
Mr. Wong (fictional detective) Mr. Wong (fictional detective) James Lee Wong, known simply as Mr. Wong, is a fictional Chinese-American detective created by Hugh Wiley (1884–1968). Mr Wong appeared in magazine stories and a series of films. In his story "No Witnesses", Wiley describes Mr. Wong as six feet tall, educated at Yale University and "with the face of a foreign devil-a Yankee". In the stories he is an agent of the United States Treasury Department and lives in San Francisco. Twelve stories were published in Colliers Magazine from 1934 to 1938. These were all collected in the volume "Murder by the Dozen" in