C. Auguste Dupin, the original model for the detective in literature

    Dupin is a Paris gentleman of leisure who for his own amusement uses “analysis” to help the police solve crimes. In the highly popular short stories “The murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and "The Purloined letter" (1845), as well as the less-successful “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1845), Dupin is depicted as an eccentric, a reclusive amateur poet who prefers to work at night by candlelight

   

   Dupin, a man of genious, is perfeclty described as a typical detective in Literature. A literature in which a crime is introduced, investigated and needed to be revealed: “He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural”

    

   Dupin has a greater power of observation and a superior mind: “He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences”. He prefers to observ during the night and work at night. He likes walking the streets in the dark with his companion: “At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the messy shutters of our old building; lighting a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of

rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams - reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness.”

    

    He lives in a constantly stage of reflection and he is introduced as a poor gentleman descended from a noble family who is literate: “This young gentleman was of an excellent - indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes.”

    

    He possess an analytic ability, he analyses everything even when the narrator seems distracted during the first pages of the story. He acquires a method of deduction that sometimes it makes you think how fast a mind works. 

  As regards the murder itself, Dupin reads the newspaper but refuses to judge the murder just by reading an article: “There´s no method in their proceedings” : “We must not judge of the means,” said Dupin, “by this shell of an examination. The Parisian police, so much extolled for acumen, are cunning, but no more. There is no method in their proceedings, beyond the method of the moment.”

    

    He is interested in the unrevealing mysteries and things that are hard to understand. He uses the analogy of playing games such as chess or card games to clarify his point of view: “I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess”.

     He combines analysis and intuition to solve the crime: “His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.”