To accompany the release of his new novel The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl has edited and written the introduction to a new Modern Library edition of Poe's detective stories. The Dupin Tales comprises "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter", as well as a few selections from Voltaire, Vidocq and Leggett which feature pre-Dupin "detectives."
While I had read the Dupin stories before (and enjoyed them for the classics they are), it was quite nice to have them in this form, and I enjoyed reading them again - particularly accompanied by Pearl's introduction and the other excerpts that were included in this volume. This makes an excellent companion to Poe Shadow, and serves as quite a good reminder that the dectective genre largely was born of the mind of Edgar Allan Poe.
At the author event the other night, Pearl remarked briefly on this book, noting a blurb on the front cover from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle calling Dupin "The best detective in fiction ... Dupin is unrivalled." This was Conan Doyle's response, Pearl said, to a question about whether Dupin or Sherlock Holmes was the greater detective.
If you've not read Dupin (and you like detective fiction), you should. Even if you've read the stories before, they're always worth another look ... particularly on a dark, rainy night like we've been having so many of lately.
