Table of Contents
The investigations of C. Auguste Dupin
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Introduction
WELCOME TO THE 3 Books To Know series, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books.
These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies.
We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is: Detective Fiction.
When Edgar Allan Poe wrote his first Tales of Ratiocination. What he called stories for the mind. He had not imagined that he would be creating what we now know as Detective Fiction. For that reason, the #1 book selected is a collection of tales from Poe's great detective, Auguste Dupin. A parisian gentlemen with the sharpest mind.
British author Arthur Conan Doyle was a fan of Poe. Inspired by Dupin tales, he created one of the most famous detectives of all fiction, Sherlock Holmes. So our book #2 could only be: The Hound of the Baskervilles. A harrowing tale of mystery in England's countryside.
G. K. Chesterton created a different detective, a detective who was also a Catholic priest. The amateur detective, Father Brown, often known for his uncanny insight into human evil, is our choice #3. The book's name The Innocence of Father Brown.
This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topics.
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Authors
EDGAR ALLAN POE (January 19, 1809 to October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, critic and editor best known for evocative short stories and poems that captured the imagination and interest of readers around the world. His imaginative storytelling and tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective story.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, On May 22, 1859. In 1890 his novel, A Study in Scarlet, introduced the character of Detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle would go on to write 60 stories about Sherlock Holmes. He also strove to spread his Spiritualism faith through a series of books that were written from 1918 to 1926. Doyle died of a heart attack in Crowborough, England on July 7, 1930.
G.K. Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874 in London. He was known for writing academic commentary, poetry and short stories. His interest in theology and conversion to Catholicism led him to write religious fiction. In 1908, he wrote the novel The Man Who Was Thursday. His most popular work was a detective series featuring a sleuth named Father Brown. He died in 1936.
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The investigations of C. Auguste Dupin
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
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The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions,
are not beyond all conjecture.
Sir Thomas Browne
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THE MENTAL FEATURES discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension prternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.
The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion