Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

Image via Flak Magazine. I'm sure my attys won't be like Sam Waterson either.


On this day in 1841, Edgar Allen Poe's seminal detective story, Murders in the Rue Morgue, was published. Around this time, many other authors were playing with the form, so there's occasional debate among purists as to who "invented" it first, though Poe must always be acknowledged as the one who made it popular.

However, what's not debatable is that lawyerAbraham Lincoln was a fan, and that his short 1843 story, The Trailor Murder Mystery, was inspired by his own enthusiasm for the form.

Would Abe have ever become President Lincoln had his own writing become successful on its own? Would he or Poe ever have written a blessed thing if they were forced to be up near dawn by the demands of citizenship? Had they been undemocratically herded and manhandled and reduced to the contents of a printed card before serving on modern Jury Duty?

We may never know. I, my friends, am off, praying to survive the oh-so-fine-and-langorously slow grinding of the wheels of Justice.