was broken, enabling the window to be opened without obvious detection because of the appearance that it was not broken.M. Dupin notes that no human being could kill with such ferocity and brutality, as human beings do not possess such strength. Therefore, his intuitive and analytical mind must now conceive of a murderer who has astounding agility, superhuman strength, and a brutal and inhuman ferocity. In addition, he must explain a murder without motive. These clues alone should allow the careful reader to venture an educated guess as to the nature of the perpetrator of the crime. Most readers however, like the narrator, need more clues. We then read that M. Dupin has compared the tuft of hair found in one of the victims hands as not being human and that the handprint found at the scene is in direct proportion to an "Ourang-Outang." Furthermore, he has advised the owner through a newspaper ad to claim his lost animal. Once arrived, the sailor admits to witnessing the commission of the crime, being powerless to stop it.You cannot read the collected tales of Poe without being aware that you are in the hands of a most peculiar writer, perhaps disturbed and obsessed. He touched on an underside of madness and the criminal mind that readers were squeamish to acknowledge. Poe's preoccupation with death was itself perfectly orthodox in a period when death was an everyday family event, in a way that is difficult for us for whom death is a resented intrusion to remember. If we accept Poe's invitation to play detective, and commence to read him with an eye for submerged meaning, it is not long before we sense that there are meanings to be found through his repeated use of certain narrative patterns, repetition of certain words and phrases, and use in his detective stories of certain scenes and properties. (Wilbur 52-53) Poe's tales are intriguing enough to hypnotize the reader to finish the tale in a single sitting, so that the tale ca...
