The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [134]
It is supposed that Trippetta, stationed on the roof of the saloon, had been the accomplice of her friend in his fiery revenge, and that, together, they effected their escape to their own country; for neither was seen again.
Mysteries
Poe revealed his passion for solving puzzles in an early essay by deducing the human intelligence operating a chess-playing automaton. His exercises in “autography” identified crucial personality traits revealed by handwritten signatures, and he flaunted his virtuosity as a cryptographer by promising to solve any simple-substitution cryptogram devised by readers. About the same time he also encountered in translation the serialized memoirs of Vidocq, a French criminal-turned-detective, whose exploits aroused his interest in criminal investigation.
After probing the alienated consciousness of a fiend pursued by his double in “William Wilson,” Poe developed in “The Man of the Crowd” a parallel narrative in which an analytical narrator stalks a stranger said to be “the type and the genius of deep crime.” In the streets of nocturnal London, the would-be detective and his counterpart both lay claim to the title “the man of the crowd” as they reveal a shared compulsion: neither city-dweller can abide human solitude.
Borrowing from Vidocq to create an imaginary Paris, Poe established in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the basic conventions of the detective story: an eccentric sleuth, an admiring but less perceptive companion, an inept police chief, and a seemingly insoluble crime—here the murder of two women inside a locked room. C. Auguste Dupin cracks the case (which savors of antebellum racial fears) and then ensnares the sailor, who reveals the awful truth.
Poe turned from murder to buried treasure in “The Gold-Bug” and in an American tale portrayed the South Carolina island where he served in the U.S. Army. The eccentric protagonist, William Legrand, solves a cryptogram inscribed on parchment in invisible ink, and with the help of Jupiter, a manumitted slave, performs a bizarre, Gothic ritual that enables him to locate the dazzling contents of a buried chest.
In a similarly playful vein, Poe conceived “The Oblong Box,” a tale of grief, shipwreck, and death narrated by an aspiring sleuth who misconstrues every bit of evidence connected with Cornelius Wyatt and the box he brings aboard a ship bound from Charleston to New York. The unexpected sinking of the Independence (near the site of the first English settlement in America) injects a subtle hint of national allegory as it exposes Wyatt’s elaborate charade.
An esoteric mystery surrounds the death of Augustus Bedloe, who in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” travels through time and space to relive an insurrection in India nearly fifty years earlier. Poe invokes reincarnation when Dr. Templeton (who witnessed the revolt against British imperialism) explains Bedloe’s odd resemblance to a friend killed in India. Allusions to “Indian summer” and the “fierce races” native to Virginia may imply an analogy to U.S. Indian removal.
After the inconclusive “Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Poe crafted his most brilliant detective story in “The Purloined Letter.” Here, the theft of an incriminating love letter from the queen’s boudoir by the Minister D—triggers first the methodical search by the Prefect of Police and then Dupin’s ingenious recovery of the letter. He deduces the principle of concealment by identifying with the thief, against whom he seeks private revenge.
Poe ascribed the popularity of his ratiocinative tales partly to novelty: “I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method.” After “The Purloined Letter” he wrote only one more crime story, a modest backwoods satire called “Thou Art the Man.” But by virtue of the Dupin stories alone, Poe’s name has remained forever associated with tales of mystery and detection.
THE MAN OF THE CROWD
Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.