The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: Three Tales Featuring C. Auguste Dupin

"It contains three stories, and each of them represents what is possible to do in the genre. The first is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the first detective story ever. It establishes the convention of the reclusive but brilliant detective along with his sidekick who narrates the story. It’s the first locked-room mystery. Two bodies are found stuffed into a chimney in a locked apartment in Paris and nobody can figure out how it happened. It sets up so many of the tropes that are now familiar from detective fiction. Although Dupin is physically unprepossessing, he decodes the crime scene like a mind reader. “The Purloined Letter” concerns a missing piece of royal correspondence whose contents, if publicized, will be disastrous to the regime. So the detective sets out to find the letter. It’s the forerunner of postmodern detective fiction by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges or Paul Auster, where the mysteries are metaphysical puzzles about language and thought as much as they’re attempts to solve a crime. “Sensation was his primary goal” The third story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” is the first murder mystery to be based on a real case – the story of Mary Rogers, a Broadway salesgirl whose strangled body washed up along the Hudson. Poe transposes the story to Paris, but Poe quotes at great length from actual newspaper articles, assuming that he’s smart enough to figure out what actually happened. In fact, he gets it wrong – Rogers died of a botched abortion, not of murder – but the disturbing pattern of the hyperrational male obsessively inspecting a dead female body sets the pattern still followed by shows like CSI today. There have been well over a hundred film adaptations of Poe’s stories, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, when Roger Corman made a series of movies starring Vincent Price. But Poe’s real influence has less to do with his plots than with his emphasis on creating intense sensations in his audience. In that sense, Hitchcock’s most Poe-like work is Psycho : it’s a completely lurid story, shot on a tiny budget with Hitchcock’s television crew. And it was, dollar for dollar, the most commercially successful film of Hitch’s career. Poe’s mix of sensational subject matter with carefully controlled narration isn’t at all far from the game that Hitchcock played for most of his career."

"This is by Edgar Allan Poe , the great American writer, and most people would agree that it’s the first actual detective story. There are other stories about crime beforehand, there are even one or two locked room mysteries, but this is the first great detective story . The detective is called Auguste Dupin and it’s set in Paris. Dupin is the archetypal great detective, the brilliant reasoning machine with an admiring unnamed friend who’s the narrator of his exploits. There are two women murdered. One of them is found in a room that’s locked and shuttered and there’s no way in and no way out. You can’t get through the ceiling; you can’t get through the floor. How did it happen? That’s the central puzzle. The police are baffled by the murders, but by applying his brand of logic, Dupin solves the mystery to everybody’s amazement. I won’t say what the solution is but it’s a pretty remarkable one, that’s for sure. So “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was really a very significant story historically, and also very entertaining and influential in all sorts of ways. That’s right. Sherlock Holmes was the prime inheritor of Dupin’s mantle. There were a number of impossible crime stories written by Conan Doyle . One or two of those are quite excellent, actually."