Poe, Dupin and the Mary Rogers Case

In 1841 the body of Mary Rogers, the "beautiful cigar girl" of New York, was taken from the Hudson. Edgar Allan Poe moved the case to Paris and gave it to Dupin to solve. Eighty-five years later a Japanese physiologist confined to his sickroom set Poe's "facts" beside the newspapers of 1841 and showed where the master's logic contradicts itself, and why the tale still stands as the model of the detective story.

Kosakai Fuboku (1890-1929) was the most learned champion of Japan's new detective fiction. This book gathers seven of his essays and prefaces from 1923 to 1928: the commentary that introduced Edogawa Rampo's first story, his preface to Rampo's first book, a confession of his favorite authors (Poe and Maurice Level), a comparison of Poe's cold Dupin with Duse's warm Leo Kalling, his long Study of "The Marie Rogêt Case," a portrait of the novelist Kunieda Shirō, and his foreword to his own collected stories.

Each essay is translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes identifying Kosakai's sources, and publication information.