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“Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” said Dupin.
“Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?”
“A little too self-evident.”
Dupin here teases the prefect when the prefect first comes to him for help finding the missing letter. Before hearing any details of the case, Dupin already suggests that part of the problem might be that the prefect is overcomplicating matters by looking too closely. Dupin knows how the police operate and understands that their method often leads to them getting bogged down in the details of a case. Dupin believes the truth of a matter is often hidden in plain sight, simple and obvious.
We examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and, indeed the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope.
This quotation comes from the prefect’s description of the extremely thorough police search of Minister D––’s hotel. Here, the police do not merely look behind pieces of furniture but examine the furniture in detail, even relying on a microscope (magnifying lens) to detect minute detail. All this complex, detail-oriented searching is useless because they have not considered the larger, big picture fact of the case, which is that they are dealing with Minister D––, who would not hide a letter in a conventional place.
