G - is a stock figure of early crime fiction. The dreaminess of the two friends and fellow smokers is disturbed by the arrival of Monsieur G -, prefect of the Paris police. As these are also the subjects of earlier stories by Poe, the reader is reminded not so subtly that the atmosphere in 'The Purloined Letter' is as much literary as it is criminal.

As the smoke from his pipe curls about him, the narrator establishes a context of crime solving as he confesses that he has been thinking about two other mysteries deciphered by Dupin, the affair of the Rue Morgue and the murder of Marie Rogêt. Auguste Dupin 'enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum' in Dupin's library. The reader's sense of excited participation is grounded not in the facts of the case but in the duel of wits that occurs between formidable antagonists.Īlthough the plot of 'The Purloined Letter' is predicated on intense cerebral activity, the story begins in a decidedly dreamy mood, with the anonymous narrator and his friend C. 'The Purloined Letter' belongs to a group of detective stories that Poe called tales of ratiocination, or reasoning, as opposed to typical sleuth work such as gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses. When a police official cannot discover the whereabouts of a stolen letter, he consults a private detective, who quickly concludes that the thief has left the letter in plain sight in his rooms, thus thwarting investigators who expected it to be hidden.

For a story so simple on its surface, Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Purloined Letter' is a favorite of literary critics, who see an endless succession of complications beneath the tale's elementary plot.

The stolen letter edgar allan poe