Reading Wednesday
Mar. 25th, 2026 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starsprayLook at me actually reading things!
The Mystery of Marie Roget, by Edgar Allan Poe - It's was...fine, up until the end. Most of these Dupin stories are just him talking about his methods instead of actually employing them, but the ending of this one is deeply frustrating. Like, I get that Poe was writing well before murder mysteries were an established genre but ending it like "We, the magazine publishing this, don't think it's appropriate to share the details but trust us Dupin totally led the police to the murderer and he was apprehended and everything" is so deeply unsatisfying. It's blatantly ripped from the headlines--there's a whole multiparagraph disclaimer at the end about how the similarities are entirely coincidental etc etc, which you would think was setting up for the reveal of whodunit with the caveat that the fictionalized character is of course not the real person he's based on or whatever, but nooo.
The Purloined Letter, also by Poe - Better than Marie Roget but that's a very low bar. A lot of it was Dupin going off on mathematicians for some reason, but he also actually did something and related actual events, which was nice.
All in all I think Poe is far better suited to horror and to poetry, though I can see the seeds of what we get in later fictional detectives in these stories, which is kind of fun. Nothing I'll be in a hurry to revisit, though.
Not sure this has brought me out of my reading slump but at least I started and finished both stories.
The Mystery of Marie Roget, by Edgar Allan Poe - It's was...fine, up until the end. Most of these Dupin stories are just him talking about his methods instead of actually employing them, but the ending of this one is deeply frustrating. Like, I get that Poe was writing well before murder mysteries were an established genre but ending it like "We, the magazine publishing this, don't think it's appropriate to share the details but trust us Dupin totally led the police to the murderer and he was apprehended and everything" is so deeply unsatisfying. It's blatantly ripped from the headlines--there's a whole multiparagraph disclaimer at the end about how the similarities are entirely coincidental etc etc, which you would think was setting up for the reveal of whodunit with the caveat that the fictionalized character is of course not the real person he's based on or whatever, but nooo.
The Purloined Letter, also by Poe - Better than Marie Roget but that's a very low bar. A lot of it was Dupin going off on mathematicians for some reason, but he also actually did something and related actual events, which was nice.
All in all I think Poe is far better suited to horror and to poetry, though I can see the seeds of what we get in later fictional detectives in these stories, which is kind of fun. Nothing I'll be in a hurry to revisit, though.
Not sure this has brought me out of my reading slump but at least I started and finished both stories.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-25 09:54 pm (UTC)Oh dear.
You're reading, yay!