ABSTRACT
Those who take the short view of the history of the genre generally acknowledge four, or sometimes five, Edgar Allan Poe stories as marking the birth of mystery and detective fiction, or ‘clue puzzles’ (Knight 2004: 81). These are ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, ‘The Purloined Letter’, ‘The Gold Bug’, and, in a contentious fifth position, ‘Thou Art the Man’. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’
introduces the genius detective Auguste Dupin, who also appears in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’, and who, in the first of the stories, investigates an apparently motiveless and unsolvable double murder in the Rue Morgue. ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ is a thinly fictionalised account of the death of Mary Rogers, a New York shop assistant whose real-life murder was never solved. The details of the murder are transplanted to Paris, where Dupin proposes a solution to the crime based solely on his reading of newspaper reports. ‘The Purloined Letter’, the last of the Dupin stories, concerns the theft of a compromising letter from the Queen of France, and Dupin’s recovery of it from the thief, a high-ranking minister. Of all of Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’, ‘The Purloined Letter’ has attracted the most critical attention, from Jacques Lacan’s famous ‘Seminar’ to Jacques Derrida’s critical response to it. In contrast, the remaining two stories have received very little critical attention, the first of them, ‘The Gold Bug’, because it is generally viewed as merely a fictional outlet for Poe’s academic interest in cryptography, and the second, ‘Thou Art the Man’, because it clearly parodies the mystery-story form whose outlines Poe had sketched only a few years previously.
