Edgar Allen Poe's famous amateur detective, C. Auguste Dupin, first appeared in his 1841 tale, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The character would resurface a year later in "The Mystery of Marie Roget." But it is Dupin's third and final appearance in "The Purloined Letter" that many consider Poe's best venture into a genre he himself created — detective fiction.
Who Is Poe's Amateur Detective C. Auguste Dupin?
Often credited as the "first-ever fictional detective," C. Auguste Dupin is an analytical and frightfully perceptive amateur private investigator. He earns the "detective" distinction if not in title than through his process. With his three short stories featuring Dupin, Poe is often heralded as the inventor of detective fiction and the modern mystery.
Poe's so-called "detective" — in reality an unemployed, Parisian philosopher with keen gifts of observation and rational assumption — Dupin takes to crime solving only to amuse himself and, perhaps, to show off his superior intellect. He earns his private investigator status through sheer curiosity, as chronicled in Poe's first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
Reading a newspaper that details the unsolved murders of two women who lived together in their Paris home, Dupin's intellectual mind cannot resist the challenge presented by them. An acquaintance of Dupin is imprisoned for the crimes. With no experience in crime solving or police work, Dupin offers his services to the local police prefect, confident in his ability to deduce that which the police could not. Thus, a private investigator of sorts is born.
Although "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a solid but sensationalized read, Poe's follow-up Dupin adventure, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" is dreadfully dull. It reads more like an essay on reasoning than a detective story, void of any tension or climax. It was not until 1844's "The Purloined Letter" that Poe restored Dupin and the detective story to their former status and beyond.
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" — C. Auguste Dupin's Last Appearance is His Best
In "The Purloined Letter," there are no murders to be solved, nothing extraordinary to behold, and no complexity to the problem Dupin is called upon to solve. However, the beauty of the tale is in its simplicity.
"The Purloined Letter," of course, begins with a crime. But the crime is as basic as the story's name explicitly states — a stolen letter, one of royal significance. The culprit of the crime is known to all. To simplify things further, the location where the letter is concealed is also known. Dupin's sole quest is to find where on the premises the letter is hidden and secure it before its contents can be used for blackmail.
By merely placing himself in the shoes (and mind) of the crafty criminal, Dupin speedily surmises that the letter must be hidden in plain sight — hidden in such a way that intense scrutiny, such as that employed by the police, would cause the searcher to overlook or disregard the letter. Gaining entry into the blackmailer's home under false pretenses, Dupin spots the letter and replaces it with a fake. He returns it the police for a large reward.
Analysis of Poe's "The Purloined Letter"
So Dupin steals a letter from the thief who stole it in the first place. What's so great about so simple a story as "The Purloined Letter?"
When playing Texas Hold-Em, good players play their opponents, not their cards. Being able to anticipate what a player will do based on past hands, body language, and whatever else one can devise about the personality of his/her opponent separates the winners from the losers.
Likewise, the genius of "The Purloined Letter" is that Dupin goes beyond analysis of the evidence, testimony, and crime scenes as in Poe's two earlier stories to attempt to think like his adversary. He sums up all he knows about the thief, weighing such personality traits as his intelligence, his egotism, and his audaciousness. To outwit the thief, Dupin has to think like the thief.
A short, crisp tale, "The Purloined Letter" isn't as fantastical as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," nor is it as endless and anti-climatic as "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt." Instead, it offers another dimension to Poe's eccentric logician, C. Auguste Dupin, a character who continues to serve as the prototypical detective.
Jason Parent - Jason Parent earned his Bachelor's Degree in English in 2000 and his Juris Doctorate in 2006. He currently works as an attorney with a ...
