More Unnecessarily Long Rants from Dupin
In "The Purloined Letter", the narrator and Dupin are hanging out when the Prefect of the Parisian police comes in asking Dupin for help solving their mystery. Some important woman had a letter with sensitive information taken from right in front of her, but the person she didn't want knowing about it was also in the room at the time, so she couldn't stop the thief. The police know who has the letter and that it's still at his house, but they've searched every possible hiding spot in the house and haven't found anything. Dupin advises that they go back and look again, and that he has no other advice. When the Prefect comes back a month later, he still hasn't found the letter, but now Dupin has it. This is all that happens in this story.
While the theme of hiding in plain sight is certainly interesting, Dupin goes in a really roundabout way explaining this concept. He talks for a long time about how an 8-year-old boy is more perceptive than G----, and how all fools are poets, but D---- was able to outsmart the Prefect because he is both a mathematician and a poet, and the Prefect was unable to survey the house from the Minister's perspective. Some of this stuff didn't really make sense to me, but I guess that's just typical Poe.
I did like how all of this information was revealed, though. I found it really comical when Dupin works the Prefect to get him to admit that he would give 50,000 francs to anyone who helped him find the letter, and then immediately says he wants 50,000 francs for the letter. Of course, Dupin has this brilliant plan that nobody else knows about, until he explains to the narrator his ingenious thinking all along. This is more of Dupin's typical style, but it still feels like the rambling could have been cut down by a lot.
While the theme of hiding in plain sight is certainly interesting, Dupin goes in a really roundabout way explaining this concept. He talks for a long time about how an 8-year-old boy is more perceptive than G----, and how all fools are poets, but D---- was able to outsmart the Prefect because he is both a mathematician and a poet, and the Prefect was unable to survey the house from the Minister's perspective. Some of this stuff didn't really make sense to me, but I guess that's just typical Poe.
I did like how all of this information was revealed, though. I found it really comical when Dupin works the Prefect to get him to admit that he would give 50,000 francs to anyone who helped him find the letter, and then immediately says he wants 50,000 francs for the letter. Of course, Dupin has this brilliant plan that nobody else knows about, until he explains to the narrator his ingenious thinking all along. This is more of Dupin's typical style, but it still feels like the rambling could have been cut down by a lot.
I agree that one of the best parts of the story was the reveal to the Prefect of who has the letter. I also thought the story Dupin tells before he does this is funny as well. He essentially calls out the Prefect for being a freeloader by telling a story of a man trying (and failing) to get medical advice for free, and then hits him with the "pay up". This was really savage on Dupin's part and it was definitely the highlight of the story for me. With that said, maybe it would have worked better of the mathematical ramblings were cut down and replaced with more talk about why being a freeloader is bad.
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