Mystery of Marie Roget

Drawn from a real, unsolved killing, Edgar Allan Poe's The Mystery of Marie Roget sends the analytical Chevalier Dupin to the banks of the Seine, reasoning his way through a scandal that had baffled the newspapers.

First serialised between 1842 and 1843, this second Dupin story is a bold experiment: Poe transplanted the genuine, unsolved New York death of the shop assistant Mary Rogers to Paris, renamed her Marie Rogêt, and set his detective to solve it purely from press reports. The result is a pioneering feat of armchair deduction, sifting rumour, red herrings, and contradictory testimony to reach the truth. Poe (1809 - 1849), the American originator of detective fiction, here fused sensational journalism with cold, logical method, and in doing so shaped the true-crime puzzle that writers still return to today.