If we may exclude the ‘Marie Roget’ narrative in which Poe was working over an actual case of murder, we find him only three times undertaking the “tale of ratiocination,” to use his own term; and in all three stories he was singularly happy in the problem he invented for solution.  For each of the three he found a fit theme, wholly different from that employed in either of the others.  He adroitly adjusted the proper accessories, and he created an appropriate atmosphere.  With no sense of strain, and no awkwardness of manner, he dealt with episodes strange indeed, but so simply treated as to seem natural, at least for the moment.  There is no violence of intrigue or conjecture; indeed Poe strives to suggest a background of the commonplace against which his marvels may seem the more marvelous.  In none of his stories is Poe’s consummate mastery of the narrative art, his ultimate craftsmanship, his certain control of all the devices of the most accomplished story-teller, more evident than in these three.

And yet they are but detective-stories, after all; and Poe himself, never prone to underestimate what he had written, spoke of them lightly and even hinted that they had been overpraised.  Probably they were easy writing—­for him—­and therefore they were not so close to his heart as certain other of his tales over which he had toiled long and laboriously.  Probably also he felt the detective-story to be an inferior form.  However superior his stories in this kind might be, he knew them to be unworthy of comparison with his more imaginative tales, which he had filled with a thrilling weirdness and which attained a soaring elevation far above any height to be achieved by ingenious narratives setting forth the solving of a puzzle.

It is in a letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke, written in 1846, that Poe disparaged his detective-stories and declared that they “owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key.  I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—­but people think them more ingenious than they are—­on account of their method and air of method.  In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?  The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”  Here, surely, Poe is over-modest; at least he over-states the case against himself.  The ingenuity of the author obviously lies in his invention of a web which seemingly cannot be unraveled and which nevertheless one of the characters of the tale, Legrand or Dupin, succeeds in unraveling at last.  This ingenuity may be, in one way, less than that required to solve an actual problem in real life; but it is also, in another way, more, for it had to invent its own puzzle and to put this together so that the secret seemed to be absolutely hidden, altho all the facts needed to solve it were plainly presented to the reader.