As was often the case, Poe was in need of money. I don’t think that’s why he dove into this lightly fictionalized investigation into the celebrated Mary Rogers case, but I do think it’s why he borrowed the authority of his freshly-minted detective C. Auguste Dupin for it. It made the story an easier sell.

At least I can’t think of any other reason for Dupin being here. This is the odd-story-out of the three Dupin mysteries Poe wrote, and by far the longest, but it’s also the least popular. And that for good reason. While of interest to true crime aficionados for the way it re-imagines a real criminal case — while telling us that this is exactly what it’s doing — it’s nearly unreadable for everyone else. I’d read it once years ago and it was a struggle getting through it again. It’s one of the dullest things Poe ever wrote.

Why is it so bad? For starters, it’s not so much a story as an examination of the evidence in the Rogers case, based on Dupin/Poe’s reading of various newspaper accounts. In this it’s not that big a leap from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” since in that story Dupin does a lot of his thinking about the case based on the news stories he reads. But what we have here feels more like an investigation of the reporting than of the murder itself, almost an exercise in explication de texte (the affection for mystery stories among literary critics might begin here). What’s more, there’s little frame to Dupin’s musings, with almost no reference to the narrator or Dupin as characters in a story. And what we do get is so enticing!

Upon the winding up of the tragedy involved in the deaths of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, the Chevalier dismissed the affair at once from his attention, and relapsed into his old habits of moody reverie. Prone, at all times, to abstraction, I readily fell in with his humor; and, continuing to occupy our chambers in the Faubourg Saint Germain, we gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.

Alas, after this promising introduction Dupin goes on to function as little more than Poe’s mouthpiece, giving us his amateur and not very convincing thoughts on the case. As some have observed, it’s really more of an essay that a work of fiction, and not a great essay at that.

Then there are none of the thrilling, even grotesque elements that made “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” stand out. There’s nothing of what Dupin called in that story the “excessively outré.” And indeed, that’s a point he underlines again here: “I need scarcely tell you,” he tells the narrator, “this is a far more intricate case than that of the Rue Morgue; from which it differs in one important respect. This is an ordinary, although an atrocious instance of crime. There is nothing particularly outré about it.” The point Dupin is making is a valuable one, about how reasoning fastens upon the unusual as something it can analyze. “I have before observed that it is by prominences above the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels her way, if at all, in her search for the true, and that the proper question in cases such as this, is not so much ‘what has occurred?’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before?’”

How does one distinguish between or find meaning in what are everyday events? It can be hard. But in terms of pulp fiction we’d still rather have a razor-wielding orangutan in any face-off between the ordinary and the outré.

This leaves us with Dupin’s method and its results. As for the method, I have to say I’ve never made a lot of sense out of it. His analysis or ratiocination (reasoning) isn’t mechanical, because that would be the sort of game a chess-playing automaton might be good at. Instead, in Poe’s world human understanding, empathy, and imagination, will always trump mere intelligence. Dupin makes observations and inferences, and for all his arrogance his conclusions are always provisional. He’s also a bit of an artist, as explained in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: “It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.” And so the Minister in “The Purloined Letter” will prove a worthy adversary for Dupin, being both mathematician and poet.

That’s all good, but does it constitute a method? Maigret would always express surprise at anyone trying to understand or emulate his method, because he didn’t think he had one. I think this was more honest. Maigret put in the work of investigating crime scenes and interrogating witnesses, but in the end his breakthroughs just sort of come to him. Dupin, on the other hand, likes to talk at length about his method, but only increases our confusion with stuff like his discussion of the importance of accident in discovery. While acknowledging that “to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries,” how do we “make chance a matter of absolute calculation”? How do we “subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools”? Even for physicists, wouldn’t this be like making the uncertainty principle certain? As with Poe’s explanation of how a poem like “The Raven” works, we get the feeling that Dupin is just putting us on.

Finally there is the matter of the method’s results. Did Dupin/Poe solve the Mary Rogers case? Not at all. We’re left with some speculations that are no more persuasive than many others that were floating around at the time. For a good backgrounder on the case, and Poe’s treatment of it, I highly recommend Daniel Stashower’s The Beautiful Cigar Girl. Then, like Dupin reading his newspapers, you can use your own method to come to your own conclusions.

Dupin index