SOURCE: Geherin, David. “Birth of a Hero.” In The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction, pp. 1-25. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985.

In the following essay, Geherin traces the development of hard-boiled crime-mystery-detective fiction from its roots in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Although it is an American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, who is generally credited with inventing the detective story in 1841 with the publication of his tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” it was eighty years before another American writer—actually a pair of American writers, Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett—created the first authentic American detective hero, the private eye. Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, significantly a Frenchman, not an American, appeared in only three stories—the others being “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in 1842 and “The Purloined Letter” in 1844—but his influence was profound for he provided...