The Chevalier Dupin is generally considered the first character in detective fiction, although he is not by profession a detective. Rather, he spends his days sitting in gloom with a close friend reading through copious volumes of forgotten lore, through the courtesies of his family's creditors. Nevertheless, on occasion Dupin gives the benefit of his intellect and wide reading to the solving of crimes in Paris in the 1840s, sometimes at the request of the authorities, in a series of stories by the American author Edgar Allan Poe:
- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
- "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"
- "The Purloined Letter"
Subsequent pastiches have been penned by other authors, notably Michael Harrison in The Exploits of the Chevalier Dupin (1968) and its expanded edition The Murders in the Rue Royale. Dupin is also one of many literary characters to appear in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill.
In Tarzan Alive, Philip José Farmer mentions that Dupin's father, Charles Dupin, was one of twin sons to Honoré Delagardie and his wife, who had been present at the Wold Newton Meteorite strike. In the French Wold Newton Universe, it is argued that Dupin's real name is Lupin and that he married Antoinette Corday by whom he had a son Theophraste Lupin, the petty thief outclassed by his own offspring, Arsène Lupin.
The French Wold Newton Universe website also refers to Vincent Mollet's suggestion that Gerard Dole's Dupin stories were actually, at least partly, adventures of his father - or that both men were actually one and the same. According to the scholars behind the French Wold Newton Universe website, the surname "Dupin" is actually Poe's name for the "Lupin" family, and that Charles Dupin's mother had had an affair with her husband's (supposed) coachman Louis Lupin. According to this theory, Charles is also the ancestor of a notorious gentleman thief, as well as father to a brilliant detective. Charles's wife is identified as Amelie de Lagardère, a relative of the Delgardies, and they are credited with a daughter named Augustine who is said to have bore Nero Wolfe as son to Mycroft Holmes, a proposition that few Wold Newton enthusiasts would likely support. A more interesting idea is Vincent Mollet's cited theory that some of the cases ascribed to C. Auguste Dupin by writer Gerard Dole might actually have been adventures of Charles Dupin himself - or perhaps that they were, in fact, one and the same individual.