The Purloined Letter

The Purloined Letter, short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in an unauthorized version in 1844. An enlarged and authorized version was published in The Gift (an annually published gift book containing occasional verse and stories) in 1845 and was collected the same year in Poe’s Tales.

The Paris police prefect approaches amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin with a puzzle: a cabinet minister has stolen a letter from a woman of royalty whom he is now blackmailing. Despite a painstaking search of the minister’s rooms, the police find nothing. When the prefect returns a month later and mentions a large reward for the letter, Dupin casually produces the document. Dupin later explains to his assistant, the story’s narrator, that by analyzing the personality and behaviour of the minister, he correctly had concluded that the letter would be hidden in plain sight.

While the story has been traditionally regarded as an early prototype of detective fiction, it has also been the subject of intense scholarly debate, notably between French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who upheld the story as a model of ambiguous narrative, and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who maintained that it was a sexual allegory.