The Purloined Letter

Select Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

Unabridged

50 minutes

Some articles contain affiliate links (marked with an asterisk *). If you click on these links and purchase products, we will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Your support helps to keep this site running and to continue creating useful content. Thank you for your support!

Unabridged

50 minutes

From the publisher

First published in a 1844 literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1845, The Purloined Letter is the third and final story that features Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin. In it, a letter containing compromising information has been stolen from the boudoir of an unnamed woman by the unscrupulous Minister D-. The police offer a reward for the return of the letter and amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin obliges them. After collecting the reward, Dupin relates the ingenious way he determined the letter's location to an unnamed narrator. The story is an important early forerunner of the modern detective story, and has a similar plot to A Scandal in Bohemia by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.