![]() Illustration of “The Mystery of Marie Roget” Dupin interests himself in the case and solves it, without help from the police and for his own amusement. The actual mystery involves a mysterious and violent murder that apparently took place in a locked room with no exit for the murderer. He opens the story with a discussion of analysis versus calculation and argues that draughts (checkers is a form of draughts) is a game that involves far more analysis than chess, which is merely a game of concentration and calculation. Ratiocination is the process of logical reasoning and analysis and Poe is extremely interested in this process. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is, however, more of an exercise in what Poe calls ratiocination than a real mystery as we conceive of it today. The narrator of the story is an unnamed man, seemingly not French, but who is living in France and was so much struck with the unusual character and mind of Dupin that he took up residence with him, paying most of the expenses. He is a young man who lost much of his family wealth through some legal difficulty and has grown lethargic and uncaring of the world except in how it engages and feeds his mind. The first story he wrote in 1841 was called “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In it we first meet C. He practically wrote the clichés, and all in three short stories. Auguste Dupin and when I got around to finally reading Poe’s stories, I was suprirsed to find how much.Įdgar Allan Poe is generally credited with being the first writer of detective fiction and he certainly is the one to first outline the kinds of things you encounter in the genre: locked room mysteries, armchair detectives, blackmail, missing valuables, less-than-brilliant police (which probably isn’t fair to the police), jealousy, murder, smoking pipes, innocents accused, odd crimes that have fantastic, but very simple solutions. I have often read of how much Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes owed to Edgar Allan Poe’s C.
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