The Purloined Letter
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Purple Leaf" is the third of three stories featuring Detective C. Auguste Dupain, the other two being "Murders in Rue's Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roger." These stories are considered important harbingers of the modern detective story. Detective Poe Dupain's method of solving a crime was highly innovative. He tried to identify with the offender and "think about how it would be." In May 1844, Poe wrote to James Russell Lowell that he considered "probably the best of my correlation stories."
