Armchair detective an arm-chair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived." "The first example of armchair detecting can be found in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. In "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842), C. Auguste Dupin, working wholly from newspaper accounts, arrives at the correct explanation for a young woman's mysterious disappearance." Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner sits in a restaurant and talks to an acquaintance about cases, almost always finishing by revealing that he has solved the crime. A more literal use of this term can be found in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels
Jacques Dupin Jacques Dupin Jacques Dupin (4 March 1927, Privas, Ardèche – 27 October 2012, Paris) was a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal "L'éphemère". Dupin was born in the town of Privas in the South of France, where his father was a psychiatrist at a state mental hospital. In 1944, the family moved to Paris, where, in 1950, the poet René Char helped him publish his first collection of poems. In 1966, he co-founded the poetry quarterly L’Éphémère, with poets including André du Bouchet, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul Celan. He was the director of publication at Galerie Maeght,