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severely that when the police try to raise her body, her head falls off. There were valuables in plain view in their chambers, yet whatever deranged intruder had been inside had left them unmolested. The singularity of the crime was entirely baffling to the Paris police and the press and the witnesses—well, to everyone. Everyone except C. Auguste Dupin.
    Dupin understood.
    He understood that it was the strikingly singular nature of the deaths that made them at once
easily solvable,
for it separated the event instantly from the indistinguishable muddle of everyday crimes. It seemed to the police and the press that the murders could not have been done by even an irrational person, because they had been done by no person. Dupin’s reasoning followed a method Poe called
ratiocination
—employing one’s imagination to achieve analysis, and one’s analysis to climb the heights of imagination. Through this method, Dupin showed how a rare orangutan, provoked to a rage by abuse, had committed the horrible atrocities.
    From the hand of an ordinary person, the particulars would have seemed stuff and nonsense. But at the very moment the reader expresses disbelief at the course of events, every difficulty is eliminated by an unbreakable chain of reasoning. Poe whetted the curiosity for what is possible to its sharpest edge, and that brought the soul along with it. These tales of ratiocination (with sequels touching Dupin’s further cases) became Poe’s most popular among a mass of readers, but, in my opinion, for the wrong reasons. Mere spectator readers enjoyed seeing an unbroken puzzle solved, but there was a higher level of importance.
My ultimate object is only the truth,
said Dupin to his assistant. I understood, through Dupin, that truth was Edgar A. Poe’s only object, too, and that precisely is what frightened and confused so many about Poe. The genuine mystery was not the particular riddle that the mind aches to know;
the mind of man,
this was the tale’s true and lasting mystery.
    And I found something new to me as a reader: recognition. I felt suddenly less alone in the world with his words before me. Perhaps this is why the occasion of Poe’s death, which might have riveted another reader for a passing day or two, inhabited my thoughts.
    My father liked to say that truth resided in honest professional gentlemen of the world, not in the monstrous tales and hoaxing stories of some magazine writer. He had no use for Genius. He said that most men in the armies of the world were required to attend to homely duties of life, where Industry and Enterprise were more in need than Genius, which was too squeamish at men’s dullness to succeed in the world. His business was packinghouses, but he took to the notion that a young man should be an attorney, a complete business in itself, he said admiringly. Peter positively thrilled at the plan as though he were boarding the first ship to California on whispers of gold.
    Upon achieving maturity, Peter situated himself as an apprentice to a law office of some distinction and while there achieved notice for compiling a thorough work,
An Index to the Laws of Maryland, from the Year 1834 to 1843.
My father soon financed Peter’s own practice, and it was clear that I was to study and work under my friend. It was a plan too reasonable to object to, and I never once thought to do so—not once that I can remember, at least.
    You are fortunate,
Peter wrote to me when I was still at my university.
You shall have a fine office here with me under your Father’s auspices and you shall marry as soon as you wish. Every beautiful young woman of high standing on Baltimore Street smiles on you, by the bye. If I were you, if I had a face half as handsome as yours, Quentin Clark, how well
I
would know what to do with ease and luxury in society!
     
    By the fall of 1849, where you joined me some pages earlier, I had my profession in place so securely I hardly took notice of it. Peter Stuart and I