Edgar Poe as Cultural Warrior Part 3

By Mathew Ehret

The following is part 3 of an ongoing series devoted to bringing justice to the life of America’s greatest literary genius and also solving the 170 year murder mystery of Edgar Allan Poe. It is also a sister series to The Occult Tesla. Click here for part 1 and here for part 2.

Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination

It is here interesting to note that the method of diagnostic analysis which Edgar Poe employed in Mäelzel’s Chess Player (1836) was the basis of his creation of a new literary genre known as detective mysteries.

This new genre officially originated in 1841 with Poe’s character Inspector C. Auguste Dupin and which Poe himself called his “Tales of Ratiocination.”

All of Poe’s detective mystery tales feature narratives involving exercises in problem solving through the first person account of Dupin’s unnamed assistant. Poe’s Inspector Dupin expressed qualities of a fully integrated creative mind capable of wielding imagination and reason in total harmony based on a recognition of the limit…