![]() Dupin’s roommate, unlike John Watson, remains a nameless “I” throughout the three stories, although he is equally everyday. And the story's narrator, who is literally following the detective around, is his roommate. He’s also unnaturally smart and rational, a kind of superhero who uses powers of thinking to accomplish great feats of crime-solving. Like his literary descendant, Dupin smokes a meerschaum pipe and is generally eccentric. The real police are, of course, absolutely incompetent, like Inspector Lestrade and Scotland Yard are to Holmes. Dupin is a gentleman of leisure who has no need to work and instead keeps himself occupied by using “analysis” to help the real police solve crimes. Poe’s detective, who also appears in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter,” set the stage for that character. The key figure in such a story, then, is the detective. His stories, they write, mix crime with a detective narrative that revolves around solving the puzzle of the “whodunit,” inviting readers to try to solve the puzzle too. Though the roots of the detective story go as far back as Shakespeare, write historians Helena Marković and Biliana Oklopčić, Poe’s tales of rational crime-solving created a genre. The game's afoot, as Holmes might say (Poe didn't give Dupin a nifty catchphrase). In that story, the first locked-room mystery, two women are dead and only a bloody straight razor, two bags of gold coins and some tufts of hair are found in the room with their bodies. Auguste Dupin, he hit on a winning formula.ĭupin was Sherlock Holmes before Sherlock Holmes, a genius detective who first appeared in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” first published on this day in 1841. If you found this short summary and analysis of ‘The Purloined Letter’ useful, you can continue your Poe odyssey with our pick of his greatest stories, his poem ‘To Helen’, his classic tale ‘William Wilson’, and our pick of interesting Poe facts.When Edgar Allan Poe first introduced the world to C. Writers have been purloining, and reinventing, Poe’s central idea ever since. ‘The Purloined Letter’ isn’t perfect: it’s really a ten-page story spun or spread out to double that length, which weakens the effect of the reveal, and Dupin’s long-winded explanation of this theory of ratiocination is less effective by being advanced using a few too many examples from logic and the world of games.īut we can forgive Poe these failings, for with this story – and with the methods of analysis and deduction Dupin practises in the other two Poe stories in which he features – he was inventing the modern detective story. Not only is Holmes, like Dupin, a master of logical analysis and an amateur sleuth working independently of the official police, but Holmes, too, will go on to use the idea of distraction in order to locate a missing or reclaim a missing item from a criminal (most famously seen in ‘ A Scandal in Bohemia’). In this story, too, we also see so many of the features that Conan Doyle would go on to use to such effect in his Sherlock Holmes stories. In summary, it’s perhaps possible to become too obsessed with understanding something, with the result that one misses the obvious – in this case, the fact that the letter has been placed in just about the most visible and easily discovered place imaginable … with the result that it isn’t discovered (at least not by the police prefect). Eliot once complained that an early reviewer of The Waste Landhad ‘over-understood’ the poem. It seems to invite interpretation as a parable about the dangers of over-interpretation. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The epigraph, which Poe attributes to the Roman writer and philosopher Seneca, translates as: ‘Nothing is as hostile to wisdom as too much subtlety.’ The idea of the purloined letter ‘hiding in plain sight’ makes the story archetypal in its ability to carry symbolic significance. This is probably why so many twentieth-century thinkers, from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to the founder of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, were so interested in it. ‘The Purloined Letter’ has the force of a fairy tale or parable: there is a purity to its plot, a simplicity, an ability to resonate with deeper philosophical meaning. (Dupin also reveals that he owes the minister some payback after ‘an evil turn’ the minister did to him in Vienna.) The reference is Dupin’s way of saying he has discovered the minister’s plan, and foiled his scheme. In the substitute letter, Dupin reveals that he left a sheet on which he had written words taken from Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s Atrée: ‘A design so deadly, if not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.’ The lines allude to the story from mythology, in which King Atreus of Mycenae, in revenge for his brother Thyestes’ seduction of his wife, kills Thyestes’ sons and serves them to him in a pie. ![]()
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