Edgar Allan Poe

The Murders in the Rue Morgue Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" starts out with a proposition: there are two modes of untangling a problem. The first is that of the chess player, who looks at all the pieces on a board and decides, from the way everything is laid out, what to do next. The second is that of the whist player (whist, by the way, is like bridge, a game with four players that depends on working out what cards your opponents are holding). The whist player not only has to memorize the rules and moves of the game (like the chess player) but she also has to figure out, or deduce, from watching her fellow players, what cards they have. This kind of analysis takes both imagination and reason - and it's this kind of intelligence that we're supposed to see in this story.