The story
The Murders in the Rue Morgue appeared in Graham's Magazine of Philadelphia in April 1841. Two women are found brutally killed in a locked room in Paris, and the police are baffled. An eccentric young man, C. Auguste Dupin, reads the newspapers, visits the scene and reasons his way to the answer, which is that the killer was an escaped orangutan. A narrator who is Dupin's friend tells the story, a device later used for Dr. Watson.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 to 1849) was a magazine writer and editor who had made his name with Gothic tales and poems. He drew on the Gothic mode of Frankenstein and on the Romantic cult of the lone, brilliant mind. He called the method of Dupin 'ratiocination' because the word detective was not yet in general use. Two sequels followed, The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842 to 1843), based on a real New York murder, and The Purloined Letter (1844).
The story established most of the conventions of the genre: the locked room, the brilliant, eccentric investigator, the slower-witted companion who narrates, the red herring and the final explanation. Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes appeared in 1887, admitted the debt, though his character has Holmes call Dupin 'a very inferior fellow'. The Mystery Writers of America gives its annual awards the name Edgars in Poe's honor.
Why it mattered
- The story created the detective story as a form, giving later crime fiction its main conventions.
- Its investigator-and-narrator pair became the blueprint for Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and for countless successors.
- It showed how magazines and newspapers could create a new popular genre.
Sources
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue Britannica
- Poe Invents the Detective Story The Poe Museum
Community notes
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