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 (play) and locations used in the Masque of the Red Death, and took advantage of the fact that the Old Town Hall building dated back to 1893, 50 years after the publication of the story (treated as a factual account within the narrative), to weave fiction together with reality. Like the story upon which it is based, the Gold-Bug hunt relied on the decryption of ciphers and puzzles to lead the participants to the "treasure", which was finally discovered by a group of participants buried in a garden within the confines of the Battersea Arts Centre, and upon which the Old