THE PARIS MYSTERIES, three of Edgar Allen Poe's most delicious tales

THE PARIS MYSTERIES: Deluxe Edition
EDGAR ALLEN POE
Pushkin Vertigo
$16.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Three macabre and confounding mysteries for the first and greatest of detectives, Auguste Dupin!

An apartment on the rue Morgue turned into a charnel house; the corpse of a shopgirl dragged from the Seine; a high-stakes game of political blackmail - three mysteries that have enthralled the whole of Paris, and baffled the city’s police. The brilliant Chevalier Auguste Dupin investigates - can he find the solution where so many others before him have failed?

These three stories from the pen of Edgar Allan Poe are some of the most influential ever written, widely praised and credited with inventing the detective genre. This edition contains: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," and "The Purloined Letter."

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS TITLE FROM PUSHKIN VERTIGO, VIA EDELWEISS PLUS. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's absolutely no point in going over the plots of these three stories. You have a computer, or you wouldn't be reading this review. Google the plots if you're in any doubt about what these three tales have in store for you.

I'll tell you, instead of a book report, that I downloaded the Digital Review Copy of this book wondering what would make the edition "Deluxe." There's nothing like a critical essay included here; the DRC isn't really that exciting typographically speaking; the footnotes of then-commonly-understood Latin phrases are, I *think*, in the original texts. Many now-common terms like "tibia" and "acumen" are italicized (and still other words are italicized for emphasis, Poe makes the difference very obvious) after the fashion of the 1840s when they first appeared; as Poe was busily inventing the detective (a word not coined until after Poe's death)-centered mystery model, one is prepared to forgive the spelling of "clew."

It is a hardcover edition; it is, judging from the photo below

a truly lovely object to hold and behold. The only luxe touch that it lacks is the elegance of deckled edges on the book block.

The other worthy-of-mention luxury in this edition is learning from Chevalier Auguste Dupin the genesis of ratiocination as a basis for criminology. The idea of professional policing was *scarcely* a century old at this point; the Bow Street Runners in London forming the first ever paid professional police force under the Blind Beak, Sir John Fielding, under whose stern guidance the semi-thieving days of the watch were ended at last. Dupin, then, as a logical and observant man of Justice's retinue, would've been a rare bird indeed in a time when the Law caught whoever "everyone knew" had killed the deady and he was punished. Observation being the absolute key contribution of Dupin to detective fiction:

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation.

So, if you ever wondered where the inspiration for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation came from, it's here. The presence of mildew (italics in original), the hiding of a body in a place it wasn't murdered but is calculated to be discovered in a particular manner and/or at a particular time...all that in 1840s Paris, via the imagination of M. Edgar Poe! And his creation Dupin predates the formal coining of the word "detective" by almost a decade, this honor going to Chuckles the Dick in 1850. Much as I hate to give ol' Chuckles any positive credit, this is an incontrovertible, evidence-based citation. Ick. It hurts to praise someone for inventing an excellent word when that someone is responsible for some of the lowest moments of one's reading life.

Still...there it is. Facts are, dammit anyway, facts.