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 Murders in the Rue Morgue on the language the murderer spoke, Dupin concludes they were not hearing a human voice at all. He and the narrator examine the house thoroughly; the following day, Dupin dismisses the idea of both Le Bon's guilt and a robbery motive, citing the fact that the gold was not taken from the room. He also points out that the murderer would have had to have superhuman strength to force the daughter's body up the chimney. He formulates a method by which the murderer could have entered the room and killed both women, involving an agile climb up a lightning rod