companion of only an average alertness and keenness; and to this
commonplace companion the romancer confided the telling of the story. By
this seemingly simple device Poe doubled the effectiveness of his work,
because this unobservant and unimaginative narrator of the unraveling of
a tangled skein by an observant and imaginative analyst naturally
recorded his own admiration and astonishment as the wonder was wrought
before his eyes, so that the admiration and astonishment were
transmitted directly and suggestively, to the readers of the narrative.

In the 'Gold-Bug' the wonder-worker is Legrand, and in both the 'Murders
in the Rue Morgue' and the 'Purloined Letter' he is M. Dupin; and in all
three tales the telling of the story is entrusted to an anonymous
narrator, serving not only as a sort of Greek chorus to hint to the
spectators the emotions they ought to feel, but also as the describer of
the personality and peculiarities of Legrand and Dupin, who are thus
individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had
not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood,
they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied
intelligences working in a vacuum.

This device of the transmitting narrator is indisputably valuable; and,
properly enough, it reappears in the one series of detective tales which
may be thought by some to rival Poe's. The alluring record of the
investigations of Mr. Sherlock Holmes is the work of a certain Dr.
Watson, a human being but little more clearly characterized than the
anonymous narrators who have preserved for us the memory of Legrand and
Dupin. But Poe here again exhibited a more artistic reserve than any of
his imitators, in so far as he refrained from the undue laudation of the
strange intellectual feats which are the central interest of these
three tales. In the 'Gold-Bug' he even heightens his suspense by