The Paris Mysteries

I was randomly seized by a desire to read Auguste Dupin, of whom I have heard a lot and whose stories are so famous, but I had no memory of whether I had ever read them before.

These 3 short stories were written in the first half of the 19th century - so basically some decades before Sherlock Holmes was even a thing (Doyle wrote him in the latter half of the century). Personally, I am much more familiar with the Holmes canon than the Dupin stories, so I inevitably made a lot of comparisons while reading it.

Dupin is certainly what I would call a Holmes prototype. He's extremely intelligent in a cold, calculating, reasoning way, and he habitually makes fun of the police for not being competent enough. The unnamed narrator whose sole function is perhaps just to give us a third person perspective of Dupin as well as to ask him questions about the mystery at hand is fairly devoid of personality and seems to derive all that he has from Dupin's own. Overall though, I would say that we don't really get to know Dupin and the narrator in much depth at all, and most of their conversations feels like essay after essay on criminal investigation and deductive reasoning, rather than showcasing a substantial personality behind them.

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” has long been hailed as the first ever modern detective story, and I can see why. I kinda wish that the solution of the mystery was more satisfying, but it definitely worked for what it was. This one and “The Purloined Letter” were the ones, I think, that influenced the Holmes formula of short stories the most. The only difference between these and the Holmes short stories is that we actually get to see some action and the mystery develop with Holmes, whereas with Dupin most of these stories generally take place in a room with Dupin just giving a lecture to the narrator about how he solved the mystery, and there's really barely any action involved.

“The Mystery of Marie Roget” really stood out amongst these three short stories because it was even more devoid of action. It was essentially Poe using Dupin as his vehicle to deliver his own criminal investigation essay, rebutt all the newspaper articles, and present his proposed solution to a real unsolved murder that had happened in New York around the time, that of Mary Rogers. This was the most tedious to read for me because Poe/Dupinreally delved into every single sentence published by the newspapers to roundly refute these assertions, even measurements of muslin and whatnot... There was just a lot of exposition, and barely any action, character work, or personality.

The Dupin short stories are still worth reading if you're a fan of cosy mysteries and Sherlock Holmes, just because of how iconic it has been in establishing the mystery genre, even if Doyle really took the formula and (in my opinion) improved tremendously upon it.