SOURCE: "Poe, Le Fanu and the Sealed Room Mystery," in Notes and Queries, Vol. 13, No. 9, September, 1966, pp. 337-39.

In the following excerpt, Diskin suggests that Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was influenced by Le Fanu's earlier story "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess. "

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", which first appeared in Graham's Magazine in May 1841, is commonly regarded as the first example of the detective story properly so called. It has, however, I believe, escaped attention that the devisai of the actual mystery to be found in the story, that of a murder committed in a room to which access from outside is apparently impossible, had been anticipated in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's tale, "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess", which appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in November, 1838.¹ The parallels between the...