As their lengthy philosophical digressions make clear, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem ‘mysterious’ in the first place. For all their obvious interest in the mechanics of problem solving, the tales themselves scarcely offer solutions. By withholding evidence, Poe makes second-guessing impossible. In none of the tales is the reader permitted to solve the mystery along with the detective. Nor do the tales concern crimes in any narrowly legal sense. Only in the first Dupin tale is there even an identifiable murderer. Most important, the tales’ solutions lack the moral dimension by which mysteries customarily celebrate the detective’s ability to right wrongs or restructure a disordered society. These are not tales of chivalric retribution. The stolen goods of ‘The Gold-Bug’ are never returned to their rightful owners. In the first two Dupin tales all misdeeds go unpunished, while in the third Dupin’s response to the villainous but hardly illegal theft of a love-letter is merely to repeat the original crime in a morally ambiguous way.

Readers were wrong to focus on the cleverness of the stones. ‘Where’, Poe wondered, ‘is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself [the author] have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?’ Far from an unambiguous elucidation of Truth, detection was for Poe merely a specialized way of thinking, and one somewhat at odds with the epistemologies of the other tales. Implicitly ratiocination announces the total explicability of what remains unintelligible everywhere else in Poe. For this very reason it seems unsatisfactory and incomplete. The linguistic literalism Legrand uses to solve the cryptogram in ‘The Gold-Bug’ marks his intellect as second-rate, no more admirable than his greed. Even Dupin’s more imaginative logic clarifies reality by oversimplifying it. In interpreting the Rue Morgue murders, Dupin blithely explains away the very strangeness that the Gothic tales celebrate. And ‘The Purloined Letter’, the most sophisticated and non-linear of the detective stories, represses Dupin’s support for the kind of aristocratic libertinism and monarchial politics which Poe and his middle-class readership customarily opposed.

The limitations of detection as a way of knowing the world are clearest in what appears the weakest of the detective tales, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. Trying to explain in fiction the real-life death of shopgirl Mary Rogers, Dupin (and Poe behind him) trade on the right to knowledge afforded them by their culturally privileged position. The comparative failure of their explanations not only challenges that right to know others, it exposes the discriminatory ideologies that make the event inaccessible to them and so gives voice to the very minority identities that privilege seeks to repress. The tale records without comment how the media’s manufacture of a culturally acceptable meaning makes class and gender into ‘mysteries’. Yet by the most successful of Poe’s ironic effects, the implausibility of the ‘romantic’ explanation of Mary’s death makes the realities of class prejudice, sexual harassment, and reproductive politics all the more visible. Marie Rogêt becomes, in her resistance to Dupin, Poe’s only gendered character, her narrative his most fully realized world, her murder his sole sexualized event. And in its inability to say the word, the tale stands as our first piece of abortion fiction.

These least known tales show us Poe best. In ‘The Murder in the Rue Morgue’, Dupin argued that even madmen ‘are of some nation’. So too with Poe himself. The extravagance of his narratives encouraged readers to divorce Poe from intellectual and social issues and to imagine that he lived with his characters in some ‘ultimate dim Thule’, a dream-land ‘out of SPACE—out of TIME’. Cut off from his thoughts, Poe not only has no chance of finding a place in our cultural histories. He is robbed of the power to say anything significant to those of us who continue to live within culture. Beyond space and time he is also beyond reach, able to thrill but not to touch us. In this respect our first adolescent reading of Poe may have also been our most courageous.