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.

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