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The episode begins with a look at a story of the Prophet Daniel that many think is the first detective story. From “Can You Imagine That?”
Original Radio Braodcast Date: 1940
A woman and her daughter are brutally killed after withdrawing 50,000 francs from the bank, and Dupin is on the case in Edgar Allan Poe’s first detective story.
Original Radio Broadcast Date: January 2, 1944
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Join us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.
Hi Adam!
I just listed to the adaptation of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as enacted on radio’s “The Weird Circle”. It was well-done but lacking in some respects: the fact that the scene of the crime was found secured from within, making of this an early example of the locked-room sub-genre; and the horrific fact that one of the two victims had been shoved up into the area above the fireplace. The former, Dupin discovered, was the result of a window self-locking as it descended due to its weight; and the latter indicated a killer with extreme strength. The fact, also missing in the broadcast, that this killer was agile enough to escape via a pole that was not near the room’s window was another indication that it was an animal rather than a human (in fact, an escaped orangutan). It’s rather curious to note that Doyle had Holmes, literary’s most famous fictional detective, unfairly criticize Poe’s Dupin in one of the former’s cases.
Dear Adam,
So nice of you to, in effect, showcase my comments regarding the “Weird Circle” adaptation of Poe’s 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”; it made my day! I might add further that more could’ve been done with the discovery of a victim having been thrust up into the fireplace flue: the Warner Bros. version, part of the early-Fifties spate of horror films, created quite a shock when this victim, thought missing, suddenly appeared — albeit partially — and headfirst — photographed in 3-D! The would-be locked window in the story was thought so due to having been nailed down, but detective Dupin found that it was no longer so secured. The omissions in the radio version could’ve easily added to the effectiveness of the presentation.
It’s rather like MGM’s 1941 version of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), a well-produced film short that didn’t make the most of the victim’s pronounced eerie heartbeat, a feature that made the story a natural for radio. And his “vulture-eye” could’ve also served more to intensify the horror aspects so effectively conveyed by Poe.
I also referred to Sherlock Holmes knocking Dupin. This was in the first Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), and comes across more as “sour grapes” than informed observation, Poe’s character capable of brilliant deductions. And the author not only invented the Rue Morgue, but the detective story as we know it! Hence it being surprising that other writers weren’t inspired to write similarly structured fiction till the mid-nineteenth century! A true-life irony with Doyle was that, while his famous sleuth debunked the supernatural, he himself was “taken in” by supposed mediums whom Houdini exposed, which resulted in he and Doyle parting as friends.
Cordially,
Ray
P.S. I neglected to mention, as another horrific touch made by Poe in his Rue Morgue tale, that when the second female victim was found and lifted, so completely had the neck been cut, her head fell off!
— Ray C.