William Legrand, the central character in "The Gold Bug" (1843), shares some characteristics with Poe's famous amateur sleuth, Auguste Dupin. Like Dupin, he alternates between gloomy melancholy and excited enthusiasm, which leads the narrator (also similar to the narrator in the Dupin stories) to suspect that he is the victim of a species of madness. The basic premise of "The Gold Bug" is that Legrand is figuratively bitten by the gold bug after discovering a piece of parchment on which he finds a cryptogram with directions to the buried treasure of the pirate Captain Kidd. As with the more influential Dupin stories, "The Gold Bug" focuses less on action than on the explanation of the steps which lead to the solution of the mystery.

Although "The Mystery of Marie Roget" also focuses on Dupin's solving of a crime primarily from newspaper reports, it is actually based on...