"This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called "tales of ratiocination"--his own name for detective stories--Poe later remarked, "People think them more ingenious than they are--on account of their method and air of method. In the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story."