Poe’s Perfect Crimes

The genius of Edgar Allan Poe extends far beyond his groundbreaking creation of Auguste Dupin, which laid the foundation for detective fiction. What remains little known is that Poe envisioned an even more sophisticated form of the genre. Works in this form take an innovative approach, allowing the reader, rather than a fictional detective, to uncover and solve hidden murders. In 1844, as the Dupin stories concluded, Poe published two lesser-known works, “Thou Art the Man” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” These stories reflect his ambition to engage readers in a game of wits with himself. This study endeavors to rise to his challenge and unravel the perfect crimes—hidden for nearly two centuries—within these tales.
As we delve deeper, another mystery arises: “What is analysis?” By examining Dupin’s secrets to successful analysis and contrasting them with the failures of the narrators in stories like “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” this book seeks to unlock Poe’s fundamental mystery of analysis.

Yasuhiro Takeuchi is an Edgar Award finalist critic and winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, one of Japan’s most prominent literary honors. He is a professor at Hokkaido University and lives in Sapporo, Japan.

Yasuhiro Takeuchi
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 195
Bibliographic Info: 2 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2025
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9600-3
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5496-6
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments vii
Preface 1
Introduction 3

1. A Premature Revelation: Poe’s Deliberate Error as a Clue 15
2. Challenging the Narrator: His Contradictions and Inconsistencies 30
3. A Second Corpse: Cracking the Perfect Murders 47
4. A Fatal Blind Spot: The Narrator’s Double in His Narrative 66
5. Detecting the Detective: The Ape’s Double in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 85
6. Taking Turns: “The Purloined Letter” as a Game of Analogy 105
7. The Original and the Copy: The Pitfalls in Analysis in Poe’s Tales of Reincarnation 127

Conclusion: Unlocking and Locking Mysteries 155
Chapter Notes 167
Bibliography 179
Index 185