The Murders in the Rue Morgue Poe, however, downplayed his achievement in a letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke: The word "detective" did not exist at the time Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", though there were other stories that featured similar problem-solving characters. "Das Fräulein von Scuderi" (1819), by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which Mlle. de Scuderi, a kind of 19th-century Miss Marple, establishes the innocence of the police's favorite suspect in the murder of a jeweler, is sometimes cited as the first detective story. Other forerunners include Voltaire's "Zadig" (1748), with a main character who performs similar feats of analysis, themselves borrowed
The Masque of the Red Death (1964 film) Red Death" back, because of the similarities, but it was really an artificial reason in my mind," he later said. Eventually he decided to go ahead and do it anyway. Another fact in the delay was that Corman had a great deal of trouble coming up with a screenplay he was happy with. Drafts were written by John Carter, Robert Towne and Barboura Morris, but Corman was not happy with any of them. There were also a number of rival adaptations of "Masque" being mooted around this time. The Woolner Brothers announced a film based on the story as did