The Murders in the Rue Morgue/The Mystery of Marie Roget/The Purloined Letter: The Dupin Stories [Audiobook, Box set] [Audio CD]

 

 

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Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his poetry ("Quoth the raven...") and his tales of the macabre. But he has a lesser-known claim to fame -- the prototypical detective stories, predating Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

Though only three stories about C. Auguste Dupin were written, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales" compiles all three of them, with their baffling answers and armchair detection. These weren't the first detective tales, but they set the mold for the mysteries that followed.

We're introduced to Dupin through his pal/roommate, in "Murders in the Rue Morgue." He's impoverished but of an old family, and lives in a crumbling, gothic mansion full of his books. But his mind is sharper than anyone around him, based on the logical process of "ratiocination."

In this mystery, Dupin learns of a bizarre mystery, where an apartment was found almost destroyed but nothing was stolen. An old lady is found outside with her head hacked off with a razor, and her daughter is found throttled and stuffed upside-down in a chimney, with locks of her hair pulled out. No motive, and no suspects. The police are baffled -- but Dupin isn't.

Based on a real crime, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" opens with the death of a popular young woman, who is later found floating in the river. By reading different newspaper reports, Dupin chronicles the peculiarities of the crime, and debunks the many assumptions that were made about the crime -- how many assailants, where, when, and so on.

"The Purloined Letter" has a somewhat less gruesome crime. The prefect of police is meeting with Dupin, with a very important matter to discuss -- a compromising letter of the Queen's was stolen in front of her eyes, and now the Minister is blackmailing her with it. The police have searched the Minister's apartment from top to bottom, but there's no sign of the letter. Only Dupin knows where to find it.

These stories are are not only the roots of detective fiction, but staggeringly good reads as well. Poe -- who reportedly made Dupin the sort of logical, cool person he wanted to be -- crammed a whole novel's worth of detecting into each short story, and made even the weirdest answers (a monkey?) seem plausible.

Unlike Poe's other works, these are made up mostly of deduction and dialogue, though Poe does get in some wonderful lines about the shared mansion ("... in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper, a time-eaten and grotesque mansion"). And while the dialogue seems rather dry at first, as it unfolds, the intricacies of each bizarre plot become clear.

You could say that the one flaw of these stories is that they don't offer much insight into the characters. We don't know much about Dupin, except that he's an impoverished noble with a vast collection of books. But the stories are really about Dupin's logical deductions rather than the character himself, and how any baffling case could be solved if you just had enough clues and a clear head.

The Dupin Tales are a remarkable work of detective fiction, the early whodunnits, and are among Poe's best works of fiction. Definitely a must-read.

In these 3 short story, Poe introduces to the world for the first time the way of logical deduction, and applies it to an actual ambiguous case.

He seems to place much importance in mathematics as being the best exercise for analytic reasoning. Similar thing is seen in Doyle's Holmes, for Doyle asserts that Moriarty, the arch enemy of Sherlock Holmes, is in fact a mathematician.

Well aside from that he places much importance on meditation, a habit that is very unfamiliar in most of the world.

In the course of the first story, "The Murders of Rue Morgue," the French detective, Dupin, surprises his companion by interfering in his thoughts, an act that was criticized by Holmes in the novel "A Study in Scarlet," and that was practiced by him in some other short story of his.

The mystery, on the other hand, was a new one, not a simple one, and the deductions of Dupin were very logical and intriguing.

In the second story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," Poe reconstructs a real crime by merely building up from the newspaper clips he collected over the span of time. He finally solves the mystery in the person of his detective Dupin. Close analysis had showed that the answer provided by Poe was actually the right one.

In the third story, "The Purloined Letter," Dupin solves a very easy mystery that puzzled the police force of paris.

This book is not at the same level of Doyle's writing, it is a little simpler, but is a nice read, though. That might be true because Doyle had based his detective, Holmes, on Dupin, and had actually attained the fame that forced him to dedicate some of his time for his mysteries.

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