Poe Stories

“’That the voices heard in contention’, he said, ‘by the party upon the stairs, were not the voices of the women themselves, was fully proved by the evidence. This relieves us of all doubt upon the question whether the old lady could have first destroyed the daughter and afterward have committed suicide. I speak of this point chiefly for the sake of method; for the strength of Madame L’Espanaye would have been utterly unequal to the task of thrusting her daughter’s corpse up the chimney as it was found; and the nature of the wounds upon her own person entirely precluded the idea of self-destruction. Murder, then, has been committed by some third party; and the voices of this third party were those heard in contention.’”

In this excerpt, Dupin plays the role of the traditional detective, in my opinion. He uses logical deductions, such as drawing inferences based on the voices heard in the testimony, as well as his own logical detective skills to draw a conclusion that both he and the reader can come to; Madame L’Espanaye did not kill her daughter and commit suicide. This is a particular case, especially compared to the Holmes works, where the detective can make rather jarring and unexpected determinations without the audience knowing enough evidence to come to the same conclusion.

“What, for example, in this case of D-, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches—what is it all but an exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see that he has it taken for granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter, not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg, but, at least, in some out-of-the-way hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg?”

Dupin’s thoughts in this excerpt are very reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, as are many other segments of his thoughts. Dupin finds difficulty in bringing himself down to a level more in line with the common man. He also cannot fully relate to the average man such as the Prefect as a result of this. As a result, I think it is rather unfair for Dupin to be making these comments, especially to the narrator of the story, who does not share the same level of complexity and narcissism that Dupin does. From an external perspective, what the Prefect did in searching the house was perfectly rational, and is an excellent first step in trying to solve a case. But Dupin does not realize this. Because of his inability to relate to the Prefect, Dupin’s claims about the Prefect’s inability to solve the mystery are rather untenable, as he cannot defend his claims without placing his intelligence and bias over logical reasoning which any common man would do.

“Why—it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank—that would have been insulting. D-, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it as a pity not to give him a clew. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied it into the middle of the blank sheet the words—

             “’—Un dessien si funeste,

             S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.’

They are to be found in Crébillon’s Atrée.’”

The ending to “The Purloined Letter” is confusing, especially this last paragraph of text. It is well established and understood that Dupin left D a letter after he took the real one. However, the contents of the letter are rather ominous. The translation from French is “A destiny so fatal, if it’s not worthy of Atreus, its worthy of Thyestes”. Not knowing anything about these two Greek characters I was forced to Google them. Dupin seems to be fating D to a life of exile and solitude, which parallels Thyestes’ life after both his brothers died at his hands. How or why this leaves D a message or signal that Dupin found out his act is left unanswered, and Poe does not elaborate much on this concept, leaving much up to the analysis of the reader in a very much out of the blue ending to “The Purloined Letter”.