What practical advice does the story seem to offer?

As its name suggests, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” tells the story of a letter—one that has been stolen from the royal apartments. Although the police know that it was stolen by Minister D——, they have been unable to recover it. The prefect of the Paris police, Monsieur G——, recounts his failed attempts to Dupin, who is able to deduce the location of the stolen letter. Dupin’s understanding of the situation provides the speaker—and...

As its name suggests, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” tells the story of a letter—one that has been stolen from the royal apartments. Although the police know that it was stolen by Minister D——, they have been unable to recover it. The prefect of the Paris police, Monsieur G——, recounts his failed attempts to Dupin, who is able to deduce the location of the stolen letter. Dupin’s understanding of the situation provides the speaker—and through him, the reader—with a practical reminder: sometimes the things in front of us are the hardest to see. Or, as Dupin puts it, “the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.”

While the police spend their time combing every inch of Minister D——’s hotel looking for the letter in increasingly unlikely hidden spaces, Dupin realizes that Monsieur G—— would anticipate the police’s method. Dupin argues that the police are only trained in one approach: looking for smaller and smaller clues in smaller and smaller hiding places. Armed with this insight, Dupin is able to recover the letter in the most obvious of places: a card rack.

The story reminds us that sometimes we need to focus on the forest rather than the trees, so to speak. It depicts a mystery that is “a little too plain,” in which the challenge is produced by “the very simplicity of things.”