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 Lady in the Morgue The Lady in the Morgue The Lady in the Morgue (1936) is one of the novels by Jonathan Latimer featuring private detective William Crane. The lady of the title is a female corpse which is stolen from a Chicago morgue before the dead woman's identity can be established. The book is to a large extent a send-up of the hardboiled school of crime writing. Crane is depicted as an ambivalent figure. Although he is tough and eventually solves the case through reasoning and cunning strategy, he is also a heavy drinker and ever so often prefers taking a nap to