The Purloined Letter

Written by Edgar Allan Poe

Narrated by Chris Lutkin

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media
• Release date: Jul 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781666600476

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) reigned unrivaled in his mastery of mystery during his lifetime and is now widely held to be a central figure of Romanticism and gothic horror in American literature. Born in Boston, he was orphaned at age three, was expelled from West Point for gambling, and later became a well-regarded literary critic and editor. The Raven, published in 1845, made Poe famous. He died in 1849 under what remain mysterious circumstances and is buried in Baltimore, Maryland.