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Zusatztext “A refreshing . . . provocative! and always entertaining piece of work.” Informationen zum Autor John Connolly is the author of the Charlie Parker series of mystery novels! the supernatural collection Nocturnes! the Samuel Johnson Trilogy for younger readers! and (with Jennifer Ridyard) the Chronicles of the Invaders series. He lives in Dublin! Ireland. For more information! see his website at JohnConnollyBooks.com! or follow him on Twitter @JConnollyBooks. Declan Burke has published six novels: Eightball Boogie (2003)! The Big O (2007)! Absolute Zero Cool (2011)! Slaughter’s Hound (2012)! Crime Always Pays (2014)! and The Lost and the Blind (2015). Absolute Zero Cool received the Goldsboro/Crimefest "Last Laugh" Award for Best Humorous Crime Novel in 2012. He also is the editor of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (2011). He hosts a website dedicated to Irish crime fiction called Crime Always Pays. Klappentext An anthology featuring the world's greatest mystery authors writing about theworld's greatest mystery novels. The Dupin Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (1841–44) J. WALLIS MARTIN Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was an American author, poet, editor, and critic best known for his tales of mystery and imagination, many of them decidedly gothic in tone. For mystery readers, though, his fame rests on the three short stories he wrote about the character of Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, which Poe described as his tales of “ratiocination.” Intellectual yet imaginative, brilliant but eccentric, Dupin became the template for fictitious detectives to come, among them Sherlock Holmes, who name-checks Dupin in the very first Sherlock Holmes story , A Study in Scarlet, albeit by describing him as “a very inferior fellow.” Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 18–, I there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. So begins the story that many consider to be the earliest in which a private detective assists the police by solving a murder mystery. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first of three stories in which Dupin solves a case that has baffled police, and Poe’s importance to, and influence on, subsequent generations of writers of crime, mystery, and tales of the supernatural is significant. Consider the following passage, which might have been drawn from a story in which Sherlock Holmes or Poirot took the place of Dupin: “Tell me, for Heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.” Dupin obliges, and the benefactor of his powers of analysis can only marvel at him. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was a sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and opens with the following observation: “There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half credence in the supernatural,” whereas in “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin is exhorted to help the police retrieve a letter stolen from a woman who is being blackmailed. These three stories comprise The Dupin Tales , but as they have been analyzed elsewhere, I will not deconstruct them here. What interests me about them is what we can learn about Poe’s character from his portrayal of his alter ego (many academics agree that Dupin is undoubtedly that), for when introducing Dupin for the first time, the narrator of the story describes him thus: This young gentleman was of an excellent—indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or care for the retrieval of his fortunes. By co...
