digital audio
English language
Published March 9, 1994 by HarperAudio!.
The Purloined Letter
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On this segment of HarperAudio!,
Actor Anthony Quayle reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter." This short story, written in 1845, features the brainy amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin is called in by G., a prefect of police, to help locate a letter that has been stolen from a lady of the court by a D., an unscrupulous cabinet minister. Dupin uses his intellect to retrieve the letter, and while explaining his reasoning also expounds on his theories of intelligence, physiognomy, and mathematics. While the story’s central idea of a compromising letter seems quaint these days, Poe loses most modern readers entirely with his final line -- a classical allusion, in French no less. It translates as "If such a sinister design isn’t worthy of Atreus, it is worthy of Thyestes," two brothers of Greek tragedy.
HarperAudio! is a production of the Internet Multicasting Service. Support for HarperAudio! is …
On this segment of HarperAudio!,
Actor Anthony Quayle reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter." This short story, written in 1845, features the brainy amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin is called in by G., a prefect of police, to help locate a letter that has been stolen from a lady of the court by a D., an unscrupulous cabinet minister. Dupin uses his intellect to retrieve the letter, and while explaining his reasoning also expounds on his theories of intelligence, physiognomy, and mathematics. While the story’s central idea of a compromising letter seems quaint these days, Poe loses most modern readers entirely with his final line -- a classical allusion, in French no less. It translates as "If such a sinister design isn’t worthy of Atreus, it is worthy of Thyestes," two brothers of Greek tragedy.
HarperAudio! is a production of the Internet Multicasting Service. Support for HarperAudio! is provided by Harper Collins and by O’Reilly & Associates, Interop Company, and Sun Microsystems. Network connectivity for the Internet Multicasting Service is provided by UUNET Technologies and MFS Datanet. [Photograph from the Library of Congress: LC-USZ62-62320]