Edgar Allan Poe 
The Purloined Letter 

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.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American author of short stories, poetry, and literary criticism and theory. Titled ‘The Master of the Macabre’ he is famous for his tales of mystery and horror. He was one of the earliest masters of the short story and is widely credited as the creator of detective fiction.