I’ve enjoyed other Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems, and I had high hopes for this collection of stories featuring Poe’s character Auguste Dupin, an investigator that does the police’s work for them. Perhaps I’m missing something here but I just found the narrative to be long-winded and not particularly compelling. In the stories, Dupin goes on and on about uninteresting topics that makes me lose interest rather quickly. The stories are almost entirely narrative with no real action. I found the stories hard to get into. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, whose stories have a logical progression, this lacked any such progression. Unlike other Poe stories, where the prose comes alive, the prose in these stories fall flat. The only one of the three stories that I found reasonably enjoyable was “The Murders of the Rue Morgue”. Otherwise this collection was not worth reading.

Carl Alves – author of Blood Street ( )