By Edgar Allan Poe

The Dupin Mysteries:

The three tales that make up Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin mysteries introduce us to the delicious character of Chevalier Auguste Dupin. As a rationalist and practitioner of brilliant deduction he was to become the template for most of the detective fiction that followed, speedily, in his wake.

The first tale, The Murders in the Rue Morgue details a form of murder solving that was to become only too familiar. Using his extraordinary intellect, Dupin solves a seemingly baffling crime from the clues left by the perpetrator, clues overlooked by mere mortals like the Police. Narrated by his friend and admirer and documenting an eccentricity that charms the reader into liking what would otherwise be an insufferable arrogance, the stories bear the obvious mark of what was to become the most famous of detectives, Sherlock Holmes. Indeed Conan-Doyle was open in his debt to Poe, in A Study in Scarlet one of the earliest Holmes stories Watson compares Holmes to Dupin to which Holmes replies - "No doubt you think you are complimenting me ... In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow". But of course.

Dupin is however no mere prototype for Conan-Doyle’s Holmes. He is very much an Allan Poe creation with the gore and horror of the murder details described with a relish not allowed themselves by many other writers. The dark beauty of the bleak Paris Poe describes could come from no other writer and his strange slant on the human spirit gleams through Auguste Dupin in a way that melds with the twist of Bill Nighy’s reading to give a thoroughly chilling and unstoppable set of tales.