![]() The Man of the Crowd symbolizes everything Dupin will never decode. lies beyond the criminologist’s grasp, and has noth- ing to do with the technical solution of the problem. For example, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), Gavin Lambert (1988) thinks, demonstrates the weakness of the objective method as a tool for understanding problems which have no definite outcome and as a result-within the same logical code-no definite cause: Many of Poe’s other tales seem anti-rationalist, relying on unexplained mysteries and strange coincidences. This trajectory is from the Enlightenment rationalism of Poe’s detective, Dupin, to the apparently intuitive and non-rational epiphanic moment of Father Brown’s solution in Chesterton’s story. Chesterton’s “The Honour of Israel Gow” (1911), and in doing so suggests that Chesterton’s work represents a reaction against the kinds of certainties and omniscient knowledge on which the plot of Poe’s story depends. This article compares Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1845) with G. “He neither looked nor acted like a detective, but he always got his man.” -Jacket blurb on the 1958 Penguin edition of The Innocence of Father Brown The Chevalier and the Priest: Deductive Method in Poe, Chesterton and Borges ![]() If that bothers you I suggest you read them first. ![]() Note: This piece contains spoilers for Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, Chesterton’s “The Honour of Israel Gow”, and Borges’ “Death and the Compass”. This lightly edited version is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, December 2009. This article first appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection Vol 22, No. ![]()
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