Having duplicated the letter, he exchanged his facsimile for the original during a prearranged diversion. He memorized the appearance of the letter, and he left a snuffbox as an excuse to return. Using this theory, Dupin visited Minister D - and found the letter in plain sight but boldly disguised. With this in mind, Dupin tried to reconstruct the Minister's thinking, deciding that he would very likely have hidden the letter in plain sight. Then, he reviewed what he knew about the case. Before he did anything else, he reviewed everything he knew about Minister D. Beyond that, Dupin introduces the method of psychological deduction. One of his basic assumptions is an inversion of one of the aphorisms that was introduced in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" the case is so difficult to solve because it appears to be so simple. The second half of "The Purloined Letter" consists of Dupin's explanation, to his chronicler, of how he obtained the letter. Dupin invites him to write the check when this is done, Dupin hands the Prefect the letter without any further comment. This time, he says that he will pay fifty thousand francs to anyone who can obtain the letter for him. A month later, Monsieur G - returns, having found nothing. Dupin's advice is that they thoroughly re-search the house. The Prefect has searched Minister D - 's home thoroughly, even taking the furniture apart he and his men have found nothing. The problem is to retrieve the letter, since the writer and the victim, as well as Minister D -, have important posts in the government the demands he is making are becoming dangerous politically. The thief is known (Minister D - ) and the method is known (substitution viewed by the victim, who dared not protest). In the first part, Monsieur G -, Prefect of Police in Paris, visits Dupin with a problem: A letter has been stolen and is being used to blackmail the person from whom it was stolen. "The Purloined Letter" emphasizes several devices from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and adds several others. Finally, more than with most of his stories, this one is told with utmost economy. This is partially due to the fact that there are no gothic elements, such as the gruesome descriptions of dead bodies, as there was in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." But more important, this is the story that employs most effectively the principle of ratiocination this story brilliantly illustrates the concept of the intuitive intellect at work as it solves a problem logically. This concern with imaginative (abductive) inference ties in nicely with his coherentism, which grants pride of place to the twin virtues of Simplicity and Consistency, which must constrain imagination lest it degenerate into mere fancy.Of all of Poe's stories of ratiocination (or detective stories), "The Purloined Letter" is considered his finest. Without creative imagination and intuition, Science would necessarily remain incomplete, evenby its own standards. This methodological interest, which is echoed in Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’, gives rise to a proposed new mode of-broadly abductive-inference, which Poe attributes to the hybrid figure of the ‘poet-mathematician’. By contrast, the present paper argues that it should be understood as a contribution to the raging debates about scientific methodology at the time. His sprawling ‘prose-poem’ Eureka (1848), in particular, has sometimes been scrutinized for anticipations of later scientific developments. All three stories show Dupin’s unique method of crime solving which strongly binds his observations and conclusions by the principle of ratiocination showing that no matter how extraordinary a crime is its solution always adheres to the principles of cold logic.Įdgar Allan Poe’s standing as a literary figure, who drew on (and sometimes dabbled in) the scientific debates of his time, makes him an intriguing character for any exploration of the historical interrelationship between science, literature and philosophy. The first tale is an example of a locked room mystery, the second portrays Dupin as an armchair detective, and the third introduces the motif of an unlikely perpetrator. In these stories, Dupin solves various crime mysteries with the aid of his unnamed helper. The character of the amateur detective Chevalier Auguste Dupin is featured in three of his stories, also known as The Dupin Tales: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842-1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on detective fiction writers has been so large that his fictional detective became the prototype for many later ones, most notably Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
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