Do you know if it si true that Poe invented dective stories and if so what was his most famous dective story and can you tell me a short summary of that story? If you can only answer 1 or 2 of these questions, please tell me those answers anyway, but it would be great if you could tell me the answers to all three of them. Thanks! :-)

-- Anonymous, May 05, 2002

Answers

Not olny invented but gave the classic form and several common plots to a host of similar tales. (Ingenious private eyes at odds with the too straightforward mystified police, his narrator companion as a foil for his logic(and ours), the clues, the intuitive, deductive method, the plots of the locked room, object hidden in plain sight, secret codes). Dupin, the French detective figures in all four stories. The most famous are "The Murders on the Rue Morgue"(the first) and the prizewinning "The Gold Bug". In the Rue Morgue Dupin finds the clues to a gruesome murder of two women found in a locked room. One of the clues is the mysterious language of the killer, the other is the staste of the room and windows. By thinking outside the box(pun?)he deduces the killer was an escaped orangutang.

-- Anonymous, May 06, 2002