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The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
Historians of the mystery story credit Edgar Allan Poe with the invention of both the fictional detective and the detective story. With the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, Poe initiated a genre that has survived and prospered to this day. His creation, the detective Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin served as a model for many subsequent sleuths, and he introduced many of the staples of the detective story such as the locked room. Resurrected Press has brought together the three Dupin stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” as well as two other stories, “The Gold-bug” and “Thou Art the Man,” that also have a place in the form, so that the student of the genre may have them in one convenient, illustrated volume.This classic book was handcrafted by Resurrected Press. Resurrected Press is dedicated to bringing high quality classic books back to the readers who enjoy them. These are not scanned versions of the originals, but, rather, quality checked and edited books meant to be enjoyed! Please search Amazon for "Resurrected Press" to find both print and Kindle editions of all of our books!
200 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1979
17 people are currently reading
82 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,879 books28.6k followersThe name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 7, 2017
Ich mochte diese Zusammenstellung sehr gerne. Demnächst gibt es bestimmt nochmal etwas von ihm zu lesen.
May 25, 2018
TALES OF RACIOCINATION
A — Auguste Dupin Stories
Firstly, a note on Dupin: Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin originally comes from a wealth family, but like the formerly well-off LeGrand of the “Gold-Bug,” has lost most of it. He meets the unnamed narrator of the Dupin stories in a Parisian bookstore, where the two were looking for the same “very rare and very remarkable volume.” They move into an old house in Faubourg Saint-Germain. Dupin is not a professional detective. He loves puzzles and performs feats of deduction for the love of it.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
When Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter are brutally murdered at their residence in their apartment on the Rue Morgue (her daughter’s body is found forcefully shoved up the chimney place), the police are unable to solve the crime. Dupin pieces together the riddle from the various testimonies of those who went to the apartment after hearing loud sounds. Two voices were heard. One was in French; none of the witnesses could understand the language of the other one. Based on the inhuman quality of the grunting, the fact that the money was left, the acrobatic feats that would have had to be performed to escape the room on time, and the shape of the hand on Mademoiselle L’Espanaye’s throat, Dupin concludes that the murder was perpetrated by an orangutan, which he rightly assumes must belong to a sailor. He puts an add. in the paper and the sailor shows up looking for his orangutan. The sailor explains that the orangutan was his and escaped from him into the apartment. He shoved up the young woman to avoid having his master see what he was doing out of a sense of guilt. In this case, Le Bon is released from prison. Dupin’s analytical skills free a man who is wrongly accused of murder.
The story is also notable for its descriptions of what it is an analysist/detective does: he disentangles and makes ingenious deductions.
“The Purloined Letter”
A letter containing compromising information is stolen by the minister from its recipient, a woman of high station. The minister uses the letter to blackmail this woman. The woman has confided her situation to the police, who try and fail to get the letter back. The chief police goes to Dupin for help. The police has search all over the minister’s house, in the most out of the way places. Dupin realizes that the only place he has not checked is the most obvious place: somewhere conspicuous. Dupin visits the minister, spots the letter an easy-to-spot location and eventually nicks it. When the policeman comes, he says he would give 50,000 dollars to whomever can find the letter. Dupin asks him to write out a check and gives the police a the purloined letter. He is partly motivated by revenge in this case, as the Minister did him a wrong several years ago. Po develops his ideas of the ideal detective, asserting that the best analyst attempts to identify himself with the mind of the person he is investigating. The investigative principles he adopts are a function of the person with whom he is dealing. Because he knew that the minister would expect the cops to examine everything in detail, he followed a principle of simplicity and apparently effectively fooled the cops, but not Dupin.
“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
When a young and pretty employee of a Parisian perfume shop is found dead in the Seine, Dupin puts the pieces together and speculates on a number of possible solutions. The story is based on the actual murder of a New York Shop tobacco shop girl, Mary Rogers, in 1820, whose murder until this day is still unknown. Therefore, Poe cannot identify who the murderer is in his story. Instead, Dupin makes a series of conjectures about who might possibly have committed the murder based on newspaper reports, etc.
B. Tales of the Incompetent Analyst
“The Oblong Box”
Story in which the narrator fails to what the eponymous oblong box of his artist-friend, who is journeying with him from South Carolina to New York on a ship, is for. The narrator notices that his old friend has reserved three state rooms, although he is only going with his sisters and his wife. He suspects that it might be a servant’s and finally that he is using the box to hide an artwork of immense value. He fails to realize what any reader can immediately tell: that the box is a coffin. In the end, we discover that his wife’s bod was in the coffin. She had died and he didn’t want to make a commotion. The woman posing as his wife on the ship was her maid.
C. Tales of the “Explained Supernatural”
“The Gold-Bug”
The eponymous gold-bug in the end turns out to be a perfectly ordinary bug, but Legrand’s discovery of it leads to a series of coincidences that are exploited by Legrand to unearth a treasure of unspeakable value. ……………………………………………………..
1. Legrand is an erudite recluse who lives on Sullivan’s island off the coast o South Carolina. He moved from New Orleans to South Carolina after loosing his family fortune. He is from an ancient French protestant family.
2. Jupiter, Legrand’s servant, puts the beetle in a piece of parchment he finds by the sand-covered ruins of an old boat on the mainland.
3. When Legrand gives the beetle to Lieutenant G— for the night, he puts the parchment in his pocket.
4. When Legrand returns to his cottage on Sullivan’s Island, he finds the narrator sitting by the fire on this unusually cold day.
5. Legrand tells him of the scarab he found and draws a sketch on the parchment, not having any paper.
6. Just when he hands it to the narrator, Legrand’s Newfoundland comes in and jumps on the narrator causing him to move the parchment toward the fire and inadvertently heat it up.
7. The narrator remarks that the scarab looks like a skull; in fact, what he is looking at, is an icon of the skull that happens to resemble the beetle on the flip side of the parchment; the icon is was printed in invisible ink by Captain Kidd. (Legrand only realizes this after the narrator leaves; he doesn’t come back for another month.)
8. Legrand reasons that only important things are written on parchment and that this one contains a message written in invisible ink, which might possibly be a treasure map for a treasure captain Kidd is rumored to have left on the American coast long ago.
9. When he applies heat to the whole parchment, he finds a secret code, which he deciphers using a basic substitution cipher based on letter frequencies.
10. The deciphered code reads:
“A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat
twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north
main branch seventh limb east side
shoot from the left eye of the death's-head
a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.”
11. Legrand eventually realizes that he needs to look through a telescope (“a good glass”) from a nook (“the devil’s seat”) in a large hill. He sees a skull pinned through a tree far away.
12. Legrand sends for the narrator to help him with the final part of the search. They all go out at night to the tree with the skull on the mainland. Legrand has Jupiter clime the tree and drop the beetle on a strong through the left eye of the skull.
13. He marks the point where it fell, measure fifty feet outward and begins digging.
14. They get it wrong the first time because Jupiter, who is a racist stereotype, doesn’t know right from left and drops the beetle through the wrong eye. After doing it through the correct eye, they measure fifty feet out, begin digging, and find an unimaginable treasure. Kidd’s accumulations.
15. Legrand encouraged the narrator to think there was some mystical secret at work with the goldbug. He confesses, in the end, that he did this to get back at the narrator: “Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification. For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree. An observation of yours about its great weight suggested the latter idea."
16. The two bodies are buried with the treasure. Legrand infers that these are the bodies of the men who helped Captain Kidd burry the treasure and whom he was obliged to kill to not say anything about the gold’s whereabouts. The story ends on a dark hint: that Legrand may murder Jupiter and the narrator to keep them from telling anyone about the treasure.
D. Tales in which ratiocinative reasoning saves one's life
"A Descent into the Maelström"
Here we have a story within a story. The frame story takes place on a hike to the top of a Norwegian mountain. One of the hikers tells another of a horrifying incident he experience nearly three years ago, when he and his brother found themselves in the midst of a horrible maelstrom. His brother stayed on the ship and ended up being sucked up into the downward spiral, but his the story teller experienced a different outcome. At first, he considers how wonderful it would be to die such an awesome death. He marvels at god's creation when looking into the abyss of the inner hole. Then he uses reason to save his life. He realizes that smaller and cylindrical objects are not pulled down that quickly and he clings to a barrel which manages to save his life. The story is remarkable for its depiction of ratiocinative reasoning under the most dire circumstances.
A — Auguste Dupin Stories
Firstly, a note on Dupin: Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin originally comes from a wealth family, but like the formerly well-off LeGrand of the “Gold-Bug,” has lost most of it. He meets the unnamed narrator of the Dupin stories in a Parisian bookstore, where the two were looking for the same “very rare and very remarkable volume.” They move into an old house in Faubourg Saint-Germain. Dupin is not a professional detective. He loves puzzles and performs feats of deduction for the love of it.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
When Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter are brutally murdered at their residence in their apartment on the Rue Morgue (her daughter’s body is found forcefully shoved up the chimney place), the police are unable to solve the crime. Dupin pieces together the riddle from the various testimonies of those who went to the apartment after hearing loud sounds. Two voices were heard. One was in French; none of the witnesses could understand the language of the other one. Based on the inhuman quality of the grunting, the fact that the money was left, the acrobatic feats that would have had to be performed to escape the room on time, and the shape of the hand on Mademoiselle L’Espanaye’s throat, Dupin concludes that the murder was perpetrated by an orangutan, which he rightly assumes must belong to a sailor. He puts an add. in the paper and the sailor shows up looking for his orangutan. The sailor explains that the orangutan was his and escaped from him into the apartment. He shoved up the young woman to avoid having his master see what he was doing out of a sense of guilt. In this case, Le Bon is released from prison. Dupin’s analytical skills free a man who is wrongly accused of murder.
The story is also notable for its descriptions of what it is an analysist/detective does: he disentangles and makes ingenious deductions.
“The Purloined Letter”
A letter containing compromising information is stolen by the minister from its recipient, a woman of high station. The minister uses the letter to blackmail this woman. The woman has confided her situation to the police, who try and fail to get the letter back. The chief police goes to Dupin for help. The police has search all over the minister’s house, in the most out of the way places. Dupin realizes that the only place he has not checked is the most obvious place: somewhere conspicuous. Dupin visits the minister, spots the letter an easy-to-spot location and eventually nicks it. When the policeman comes, he says he would give 50,000 dollars to whomever can find the letter. Dupin asks him to write out a check and gives the police a the purloined letter. He is partly motivated by revenge in this case, as the Minister did him a wrong several years ago. Po develops his ideas of the ideal detective, asserting that the best analyst attempts to identify himself with the mind of the person he is investigating. The investigative principles he adopts are a function of the person with whom he is dealing. Because he knew that the minister would expect the cops to examine everything in detail, he followed a principle of simplicity and apparently effectively fooled the cops, but not Dupin.
“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
When a young and pretty employee of a Parisian perfume shop is found dead in the Seine, Dupin puts the pieces together and speculates on a number of possible solutions. The story is based on the actual murder of a New York Shop tobacco shop girl, Mary Rogers, in 1820, whose murder until this day is still unknown. Therefore, Poe cannot identify who the murderer is in his story. Instead, Dupin makes a series of conjectures about who might possibly have committed the murder based on newspaper reports, etc.
B. Tales of the Incompetent Analyst
“The Oblong Box”
Story in which the narrator fails to what the eponymous oblong box of his artist-friend, who is journeying with him from South Carolina to New York on a ship, is for. The narrator notices that his old friend has reserved three state rooms, although he is only going with his sisters and his wife. He suspects that it might be a servant’s and finally that he is using the box to hide an artwork of immense value. He fails to realize what any reader can immediately tell: that the box is a coffin. In the end, we discover that his wife’s bod was in the coffin. She had died and he didn’t want to make a commotion. The woman posing as his wife on the ship was her maid.
C. Tales of the “Explained Supernatural”
“The Gold-Bug”
The eponymous gold-bug in the end turns out to be a perfectly ordinary bug, but Legrand’s discovery of it leads to a series of coincidences that are exploited by Legrand to unearth a treasure of unspeakable value. ……………………………………………………..
1. Legrand is an erudite recluse who lives on Sullivan’s island off the coast o South Carolina. He moved from New Orleans to South Carolina after loosing his family fortune. He is from an ancient French protestant family.
2. Jupiter, Legrand’s servant, puts the beetle in a piece of parchment he finds by the sand-covered ruins of an old boat on the mainland.
3. When Legrand gives the beetle to Lieutenant G— for the night, he puts the parchment in his pocket.
4. When Legrand returns to his cottage on Sullivan’s Island, he finds the narrator sitting by the fire on this unusually cold day.
5. Legrand tells him of the scarab he found and draws a sketch on the parchment, not having any paper.
6. Just when he hands it to the narrator, Legrand’s Newfoundland comes in and jumps on the narrator causing him to move the parchment toward the fire and inadvertently heat it up.
7. The narrator remarks that the scarab looks like a skull; in fact, what he is looking at, is an icon of the skull that happens to resemble the beetle on the flip side of the parchment; the icon is was printed in invisible ink by Captain Kidd. (Legrand only realizes this after the narrator leaves; he doesn’t come back for another month.)
8. Legrand reasons that only important things are written on parchment and that this one contains a message written in invisible ink, which might possibly be a treasure map for a treasure captain Kidd is rumored to have left on the American coast long ago.
9. When he applies heat to the whole parchment, he finds a secret code, which he deciphers using a basic substitution cipher based on letter frequencies.
10. The deciphered code reads:
“A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat
twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north
main branch seventh limb east side
shoot from the left eye of the death's-head
a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.”
11. Legrand eventually realizes that he needs to look through a telescope (“a good glass”) from a nook (“the devil’s seat”) in a large hill. He sees a skull pinned through a tree far away.
12. Legrand sends for the narrator to help him with the final part of the search. They all go out at night to the tree with the skull on the mainland. Legrand has Jupiter clime the tree and drop the beetle on a strong through the left eye of the skull.
13. He marks the point where it fell, measure fifty feet outward and begins digging.
14. They get it wrong the first time because Jupiter, who is a racist stereotype, doesn’t know right from left and drops the beetle through the wrong eye. After doing it through the correct eye, they measure fifty feet out, begin digging, and find an unimaginable treasure. Kidd’s accumulations.
15. Legrand encouraged the narrator to think there was some mystical secret at work with the goldbug. He confesses, in the end, that he did this to get back at the narrator: “Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification. For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree. An observation of yours about its great weight suggested the latter idea."
16. The two bodies are buried with the treasure. Legrand infers that these are the bodies of the men who helped Captain Kidd burry the treasure and whom he was obliged to kill to not say anything about the gold’s whereabouts. The story ends on a dark hint: that Legrand may murder Jupiter and the narrator to keep them from telling anyone about the treasure.
D. Tales in which ratiocinative reasoning saves one's life
"A Descent into the Maelström"
Here we have a story within a story. The frame story takes place on a hike to the top of a Norwegian mountain. One of the hikers tells another of a horrifying incident he experience nearly three years ago, when he and his brother found themselves in the midst of a horrible maelstrom. His brother stayed on the ship and ended up being sucked up into the downward spiral, but his the story teller experienced a different outcome. At first, he considers how wonderful it would be to die such an awesome death. He marvels at god's creation when looking into the abyss of the inner hole. Then he uses reason to save his life. He realizes that smaller and cylindrical objects are not pulled down that quickly and he clings to a barrel which manages to save his life. The story is remarkable for its depiction of ratiocinative reasoning under the most dire circumstances.
April 9, 2023
3,5 ⭐️
January 27, 2023
Dupin ate, still so confused about the Orangutan though
February 4, 2015
selection of poe stories
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews