In April 1841, a magazine called Graham's published a story by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story ever written. The main character was a man named C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin was not a police officer. He was just very good at observing small details. A scratch on a window. An unusual hair. A voice nobody could identify. Dupin put these clues together like pieces of a puzzle and solved a crime that had baffled the police. Before this story, crime stories focused on the criminal. Poe flipped the perspective. He put the reader inside the mind of the person solving the crime. This made the reader feel like a detective too. Poe was poor most of his life. He earned very little money from his writing. He did not know that his idea would inspire thousands of writers. Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes forty-six years later and said Dupin was the model. Agatha Christie based Hercule Poirot on the same pattern. Every detective in every book, movie, and TV show traces back to Poe's brilliant invention.