“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

by Edgar Allan Poe

THE LITERARY WORK

An American short story set in Paris around 1840: first published in Philadelphia in 1841.

SYNOPSIS

The brilliant, eccentric French aristocrat C. Auguste Dupin uses his uncanny reasoning power to solve a brutal double murder.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Story

The Short Story in Focus

For More Information

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was born in Baltimore, where in the 1830s he began an unsettled career in magazine editing and writing. Over the next two decades, heavy drinking and frequent quarrels with his employers lost him a number of jobs. Poe meanwhile lived in Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, New York again, then Richmond again, and finally Baltimore, where he died at age 40. Despite his stormy relations with magazine publishers, he produced a steady output of widely read poems, stories, and critical reviews that often brought success to the magazines where he worked. Among Poe’s best known poems are “Lenore” (1843), “The Raven” (1845), “Annabel Lee” (1848), and “The Bells” (1849); his short stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846; also in Literature and its Times). Like such works, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” conveys an atmosphere of mystery, gloom, and foreboding, and dramatizes death, loss, and grotesque violence. Unlike them, however, it is credited with introducing an entirely new figure into world literature: the investigator whose powers of detection can be used to combat—or at least illuminate—those dark forces. Considered the world’s first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” would give rise to a literary genre rooted in and characteristic of the modern age.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Story

Growing cities and urban violence

The decade of the 1830s brought the beginning of a surge in the United States population that would continue throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Fed by high birthrates and especially by a sharp rise in immigration from Europe, America’s growing population not only spurred the nation’s rapid westward expansion, but also created new challenges for the older and increasingly crowded cities of the East. While an estimated 250, 000 immigrants had arrived in America between 1800 and 1830, more than 10 times that many—over 2.5 million—came in the next two decades, attracted partly by the labor demands of the emerging industrial revolution. America’s largest city, New York, would see its population increase from about 200, 000 in 1830 to nearly 500, 000 in 1850, and other major cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston experienced similar growth.

Excluding Boston, these were the cities in which Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote, and their urban environments shaped his work profoundly. While “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is ostensibly set in Paris, it is almost certain that Poe never actually visited France. Critics have instead seen the Paris of the story’s setting as a

DETECTING THE DETECTIVES

Like the Parisian gendarmerie, Scotland Yard’s 3,200 constables—known as “peelers” after their founder, Sir Robert Peel—could be easily distinguished by their blue uniforms. Peel’s first name gave rise to the later nickname “bobbies,” still used today for Britain’s uniformed constables. Although these early police forces were founded in the 1820s to prevent and control crime, not until the 1840s did they begin methodical detective work. In fact, the word detective did not exist when Poe wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The term was first used in print in 1843, two years after the story and one year after Scotland Yard established a genuine Detective Department, whose officers dressed in plain clothes. The expression “Scotland Yard” has since been used to refer to the larger London Metropolitan Police Force as well as to the detective force operating out of it.

thinly disguised amalgam of the various American cities that Poe himself knew intimately. This conclusion is supported by the sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin solves his second literary case. The sequel, entitled “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1841), was based on the real life murder of a woman named Mary Rogers that occurred in New York just a few months after “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published. Describing a crime closely similar to Mary Rogers’s murder but altering the victim’s name to sound French, Poe simply transferred his second detective tale to the same fictionalized Parisian setting as the first.

The wide publicity accorded Mary Rogers’s murder in the American press has been cited as the first time a brutal crime caused a media sensation among the American public. But the Mary Rogers case did have some less sensational precedents, for as cities grew in the 1830s so did public concern about the crime and violence perceived as growing with them. Accurate data on violent personal crimes such as robberies or murders are unavailable, leading some historians to suggest that the public perception of an increase in such crimes did not accurately reflect reality. More historically certain is the rising incidence of violent urban riots in the early nineteenth century. In 1834, for example, 16 violent riots occurred in American cities, and the number multiplied the following year, to 37 riots in which 61 people were killed. A major catalyst was economic hardship and related labor unrest (aggravated by a severe depression from the late 1830s to the early 1840s). Other factors included tensions between established groups and recent immigrants, and the abolition movement, whose working-class opponents feared that freed blacks would take their jobs.

Early police forces

A public’s growing concern with crime was not unique to American society in the early nineteenth century. Europeans too experienced a mounting fear of crime. In response to this fear, they founded the earliest modern police forces in Paris and London, which then inspired similar organizations in American cities such as New York. Paris boasted the first professional municipal police force; called the gendarmerìe, it arose in the 1820s out of earlier state security forces. London soon followed the Parisian example, when Britain’s Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 established the London Metropolitan Police, called Scotland Yard after its London address.

THE NEW YORK SUN—FIRST PENNY PAPER

In 1833, when the Sun began circulation, New York City boasted 11 newspapers, each at six cents a copy. The Sun, a 4-page paper with a first page that offered some catchy slice of fiction or history, sold for 1 cent. By 1835, the Sun had become the world’s largest circulating daily, selling roughly 19,000 copies in contrast to the 17,000 sold by the London Times. The writer who took the Sun to this height was Richard Adams Locke, whom Poe credits with establishing the penny paper in America and setting a stellar example with topnotch writing. “His face is strongly pitted by the smallpox,” but his eyes shine, and his forehead “is truly beautiful in its intellectuality…. His prose style is noticeable for its concision, luminosity, completeness…. Everything he writes is a model … serving just the purposes intended and nothing to spare” (Poe in O’Brien, p. 38). Locke published some sensational reports about a huge telescope that gave earth its first clear view of the moon, news that took not just America but Europe by storm. His story was a hoax, but, observed Poe, a grand hoax, “the greatest hit in the way of sensation … ever made by any similar fiction either in America or Europe”; with it, the Sun “established the ‘penny system’ through America, “one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress” (Poe in O’Brien, pp. 56-57).

Murder stories peppered the penny papers at the time too. Later in 1835, Locke wrote another set of articles, this time grounded in fact, about one Manuel Fernandez, alias Richard C. Jackson, who killed John Roberts for his attentions to Fernandez’s mistress, Harriet Schultz, at whose rooming house the two men boarded. Jackson shot Roberts in cold blood, through the head with a brass pistol, a deed reported not only by the Sun but also by its only successful one-penny rival, the New York Herald. The Herald, a paper inspired by the good fortune of the Sun, was not without descriptive flair of its own. The alleged killer Jackson, it reported, appeared at court in a blue jacket, white trousers, some boots, a black silk neckerchief, and a high shirt collar.

He is rather a small slim man with a dark complexion, heavy shaggy eye brows, protuding [sic] thick lips…. Jackson perpetrated the act in the coolest manner possible. He fired the pistol with a segar in his mouth. After the deed was done there was no attempt made by him to escape. ‘Roberts destroyed my happiness’ said he, ‘and I killed him.’… That same evening, he attempted to commit suicide by hanging himself up by a handkerchief. He was cut down in almost the agonies of death.

(Herald, September 23, 1835, p. 2)

The next year, 1836, both papers reported on the infamous murder of Helen Jewett at a house of ill repute. She was allegedly killed by a man whom the courts acquitted but the Sun condemned: “Our opinion, calmly and dispassionately formed from the evidence, is that Richard P. Robinson is guilty… . Any good-looking young man, possessing … fifteen hundred dollars to retain … counsel, might murder any person he chose with perfect impunity” (Sun in O’Brien, p. 69). In sum, penny dailies offered no shortage of real murders in the 1830s to inspire short fiction.

The gendarmerie were well publicized in America, and were likely part of Poe’s reason for setting “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in Paris. In the story the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin gains access to the crime scene because he knows the Prefect of Police, the gendarmerie’s chief officer, whom he then outwits in solving the crime.

The rise of the periodical

Whether or not the public was justified in its growing fear of violent crimes, those fears were amply fed by a proliferation during the 1830s of cheap, mass-produced newspapers, many of which specialized in sensational stories of violent urban crime. Before the Mary Rogers murder other similar cases reached New York’s hungry reading public through “penny” newspapers such as the New York Sun and the New York Morning Post, both founded in 1833 and both capitalizing on lurid, allegedly true accounts of murder and mayhem. One literary historian describes the earlier “trickle” of such penny newspapers as “swelling into a broad river in the 1830s and into a virtual flood in the 1840s” (Reynolds, p. 175). In an 1846 essay, Poe himself declared that by deluging the public with cheap, plentiful and sensationalized information, the penny papers were changing American culture in a way that was “probably beyond all calculation” (Poe, Essays and Reviews, p. 1214).

Newspapers play a central role in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which contains a number of newspaper articles; embedded whole within the narrative, they provide Dupin’s most important clues to solving the mystery. The fictional articles recount the circumstances of the story’s “most extraordinary and frightful affair” in the sensational style of the penny papers, alternating between graphic descriptions of the mutilated corpses and polite expressions of horror:

A search was made of the chimney, and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter was dragged therefrom… . Upon the face were many severe scratches, and, upon the throat, dark bruises, and deep indentations of finger nails, as if the deceased had been throttled to death.

(Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” p. 481)

The technological advances and associated drop in printing costs that allowed the penny newspapers to flourish allowed a greater number of less sensational periodicals to appear as well. By 1840 the rapid expansion of magazines and serious newspapers led the New-York Mirror to declare, “This is the golden age of periodicals!” (Mott, p. 341). Many weekly or monthly magazines published fiction, serializing novels or presenting the relatively new publishing phenomenon of the short story, which now took its place as a distinctively American literary form. Many of the stories written by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and other American writers of the period first appeared in magazines. Unlike those authors, Poe wrote many of his stories for magazines that he himself edited. Only later did he secure his stories’ publication in book form.

Despite his success in publishing, Poe long remained impoverished. In 1835 and 1836, for example, when he edited The Southern Literary Messenger on the small salary of about $15 a week, Poe boosted its circulation from 500 to 3,500, earning a modest fortune of $10,000 for the magazine’s owner. As the popularity of stories like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” suggests, Poe appealed to the public’s appetite for mystery, crime, and horror while striving for literary quality.

A gathering scientific revolution

Like the growth of cities, the related urban tensions, and the rise of mass media, advances in science also accompanied the industrial revolution in the early 1800s. By the end of the century the scientific discoveries would amount to a revolution of their own; already in Poe’s time the outlines of the emerging scientific outlook were perceptible. The most influential scientific event of the nineteenth century would be the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (also in Literature and Its Times), in which the British biologist argues that life evolves and proposed a theory called natural selection to explain that evolution. Though Darwin published the work in 1859, he had formulated his theory by 1840, the year in which Poe’s short story takes place. As later scholars have observed, Darwin delayed publication for some two decades out of fear that people would not accept it. So Darwin was not a direct influence on Poe, but their creative ideas emerged from the same intellectual and scientific context, a milieu in which evolution was an increasingly discussed concept. Darwin based his ideas partly on the work of earlier scientists, such as British geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875), who perceived that natural forces can work gradually over immensely long periods of time, and French paleontologist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who was the first to use fossils in classifying extinct species. Evolution, in fact, had already been suggested by Cuvier’s colleague and contemporary Jean-Baptiste Lamarcke (1744-1829), and the idea was supported by a few other scientists (such as Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus), though Cuvier himself steadfastly opposed it.

As with many later detective stories, scientific knowledge comprises an essential element of the background to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Although history would prove him wrong about evolution, at the time of the story Cuvier was still remembered as France’s greatest scientist, a highly skilled anatomist, famed for his baffling ability to look at a single tiny bone and recognize the animal it came from. Like his literary descendent the detective Sherlock Holmes (who mentions Cuvier as an inspiration for his own methods), Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin also relies on Cuvier. Near the end of the story, he consults Cuvier’s scientific writings to confirm the identity of the killer—a creature of which (in the narrator’s words) “the gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities … are sufficiently known to all” (“Rue Morgue,” p. 498).

The Short Story in Focus

The plot

The story is narrated by an unnamed American living in Paris, who prefaces his “somewhat peculiar narrative” with an extended discussion of what he calls “the mental features discoursed of as the analytical” (“Rue Morgue,” p. 473). To illustrate his ideas he brings up a number of games, suggesting, for example, that to the truly analytical mind, chess is less profound than either draughts (checkers) or the card game whist. This is because chess forces players to focus on the moves themselves; the other games have simpler moves, allowing a master of analysis to focus on seemingly trivial details and get to “the true state of affairs” (“Rue Morgue,” p. 475).

Declaring that what he is about to relate will offer a “commentary upon the propositions just advanced,” he then introduces the reader to his friend C. Auguste Dupin, a young French aristocrat who has lost his money owing to undisclosed misfortunes, and who has relinquished “the energy of his character” along with his fortune (“Rue Morgue,” p. 476). The narrator and Dupin live together, sharing “a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion” of the city (“Rue Morgue,” p. 476). There they live in isolation, “within ourselves alone,” reading, writing, or talking in darkened rooms during the day, and only venturing out at night, when they stroll the Paris streets “seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford” (“Rue Morgue,” p. 476).

From their observations of the city’s street life, the narrator has noticed “a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin” (“Rue Morgue,” p. 476). As an example, the narrator relates how, during one of their walks, Dupin breaks a long silence with a surprising statement that seems to read the narrator’s thoughts. The narrator listens in amazement as Dupin accurately retraces the narrator’s train of thought, step by step, from fifteen minutes earlier, beginning when the narrator was jostled on the street by a fruit seller.

GAMES AND PUZZLES IN “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”

Poe often played cards with his male friends, and likely enjoyed whist, a popular card game, similar to bridge, that he mentions along with other games in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe uses these descriptions to illustrate various aspects of mental superiority. Most prominently, however, he describes the superior “analyst” in the story’s first paragraph as “fond of enigmas, conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural” (“Rue Morgue,” p. 473). Poe himself loved riddles and especially relished cryptography. As a magazine editor, he challenged his readers to send in codes and ciphers, against which he tested his wits—succeeding every time. Modern critics have highlighted the role of cryptography in many of Poe’s stories. Hieroglyphics was another fashionable intellectual topic of his day. The ancient Egyptian pictograms (pictorial writing) had only recently been deciphered, owing to the discovery in 1799 of the famous Rosetta Stone, a block of basalt (now in the British Museum) with the same text inscribed in both Greek and hieroglyphic characters. Since Greek was well understood, the Greek text offered a key to the hieroglyphic text. Using that foothold, other hieroglyphic texts were then painstakingly deciphered by the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion (whose dictionary of hieroglyphics was published in 1841-43).

Soon after that incident, the two read in the newspaper about the gruesome double murder of two women, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, who lived together in a Paris apartment on the Rue Morgue (Morgue Street). At around three o’clock that morning, the neighborhood was awakened by loud shrieks coming from the women’s fourth-floor dwelling. After the shrieks stopped, a crowd of onlookers forced its way into the locked apartment, which was in a shambles and appeared empty. Shortly thereafter, Madame L’Espanaye was found on the street outside, beaten and decapitated with a straight razor. A subsequent search of the apartment located her daughter, who had been strangled and stuffed, feet first, up the chimney. A safe was open, and a large pile of cash lay on the floor. The case is especially baffling because the door and windows of the apartment were all locked from the inside. The following day another newspaper article gives the accounts of a number of witnesses, several of whom overheard a loud, angry conversation after the shrieks stopped, a crowd of onlookers forced its way into the locked apartment, which was in a shambles and appeared empty. Shortly thereafter, Madame L’Espanaye was found on the street outside, beaten and decapitated with a straight razor. A subsequent search of the apartment located her daughter, who had been strangled and stuffed, feet first, up the chimney. A safe was open, and a large pile of cash lay on the floor. The case is especially baffling because the door and windows of the apartment were all locked from the inside. The following day another newspaper article gives the accounts of a number of witnesses, several of whom overheard a loud, angry conversation after the shrieks stopped between a Frenchman and what sounded like another person speaking a foreign language. None of the witnesses, who are of various nationalities, can agree on what language the other person was speaking, but agree in describing the voice as harsh. A third article states that one of the witnesses, a bank clerk named Adolphe Le Bon, has been arrested for the crime.

Expressing skepticism about the gendarmerie’s ability to solve the mystery, Dupin takes an interest in it and obtains permission from his friend, the Prefect of Police, to visit the scene. There, as the narrator watches, Dupin carries out a detailed examination of the entire neighborhood as well as the apartment itself. On the way home, he stops briefly at a newspaper office.

The next day Dupin shocks the narrator by announcing that he has solved the crime. Moreover, he says that he expects a visit momentarily from, if not the murderer, someone who at least played a role in the murders. He and the narrator wait and prepare to detain the visitor, pistols at the ready. As they wait, Dupin explains that the key lies in the accounts of the loud overheard conversation, in which each witness was certain that the second person was speaking a different language—one that the witness himself or herself did not speak. Thus, for example, the English witness is certain the second person was speaking German, but he himself does not know German, while an Italian thinks it was Russian, but speaks no Russian. As for the murderer’s escape from the locked apartment, Dupin’s examination revealed that, while the chimney was too narrow for anyone to fit through, a nail used to secure one of the windows was broken, allowing the window to appear nailed shut when it could actually be opened. It was just possible for an extraordinarily athletic person to have climbed down the building from the window.

Dupin had also found a small tuft of hair, and had measured the strangulation marks on the daughter’s throat. Neither the hair nor the handprints on the throat seemed human, and consulting the work of the anatomist Cuvier revealed that the handprints on the throat matched those of an orangutan. A small piece of ribbon found at the scene was the sort manufactured on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Dupin now reveals that, when he stopped by the newspaper office after observing the crime scene, he placed an advertisement claiming to have found an orangutan that was believed to have been lost by a sailor from a Maltese vessel, and saying that the animal could be recovered at Dupin’s address. It is that sailor that Dupin now expects to arrive.

As Dupin finishes his explanation, the sailor does indeed arrive. He confirms Dupin’s deductions, saying that he brought the orangutan from the South Seas to sell in Paris, but that it escaped. Tracking it, he was horrified to see the disoriented animal attack the two women through the apartment window, and he angrily tried to summon it to the ground. The orangutan’s agitated vocalizations were the harsh voice overheard by the witnesses. In conclusion the narrator relates that the sailor subsequently recovers the orangutan, and that after Dupin explains what occurred to the Prefect of Police, the innocent bank clerk Le Bon is released.

Reading the grotesque

The word grotesque shows up repeatedly in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Near the end, for example, Dupin calls the double murder “a grotesquerie in horror” (Collected Stories, p. 497). The word, meaning “bizarre or outlandishly distorted” hails from the Greek cryptos or “hidden”—as in cryptography, or hidden writing, the deciphering of which was one of Poe’s favorite pastimes. Given Poe’s longstanding interest in codes and how to read them, one better understands a key phrase in the story. Dupin had an “expectation of reading the entire riddle” a choice of words that is quite deliberate in that Dupin’s most important clues literally come from reading—reading the newspaper, that is, and decoding the contradictory accounts of the uncomprehending witnesses. (“Rue Morgue,” p. 489).

Writing at the dawn of a great expansion in print media, an age when penny newspapers glutted the reading public with their own grotesqueries, Poe offered his readers contrasting approaches to reading itself. On one hand, the narrator—an unnamed, faceless man who feels conventional bafflement and alarm on reading about the shocking crime—provides insight into the experience of the penny newspapers’ average reader. Indeed, only in the mid-nineteenth century did an average reader emerge in America, as literacy rates rose for the first time to include a majority of the population.

In contrast with the everyman represented by the narrator, Dupin embodies an ideal reader whose “praeternatural” abilities go far beyond those of others (“Rue Morgue,” p. 473). A hero for a newly literate general public—a public faced with potentially overwhelming and often grotesquely sensationalized printed matter—Dupin is skilled above all (as he repeatedly boasts) at sifting significant nuggets from an accumulation of seemingly trivial information. He is the consummate literary detective, emerged from a background shaped by scientific progress and by the industrial revolution’s new mass-printing techniques. In command of skills to match his age, Dupin’s abilities allow him to master the resulting flood of information, which also helps to explain the detective story’s ongoing resonance for modern readers.

Sources and literary context

Murder and riddles have been staples of vivid storytelling going back to the Bible (the story of Cain and Abel; the riddle of Samson) and the ancient Greeks (for example, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King [also in Literature and Its Times] features both murder and a riddle). Detection, too, has some literary precedent; scholars point to one of the tales from the Arabian Nights as an early example. In it three traveling princes are asked if they have seen a stolen camel. Inquiring if the animal was blind in one eye, missing a tooth, and lame in one leg, they are immediately arrested for seemingly guilty knowledge, since the stolen camel was indeed as they described. They explain that along the road they had been traveling, grass had been grazed on one side only, though it grew better on the other side; clumps of grass the size of a camel’s tooth had been left standing; and marks had been made in the dust that indicated a dragging foot.

VIDOCQ: THE FIRST DETECTIVE

For the figure of the detective, Poe found his major source in the real-life French investigator Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857), a thief-turned-detective whose spectacular career and widely read Mémaires (1828-29) made him an international celebrity. In 1810 Vidocq became the first professional detective when he founded the national French police force called the Sûrefé, an important model for the Parisian gendarmerie. Fired in 1832 for allegedly engineering a theft, Vidocq went on to found the first private detective agency, which the government soon disbanded. His colorful life is thought to have inspired the character of the criminal mastermind Vautrin, who appears in several novels by French author Honoré de Balzac, including Father Goriot (1835), Lost Illusions (1837-43), and A Harlot High and Low (1843-47). In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin refers to Vidocq by name, disparaging the famous investigator as “a good guesser” but one whose methods lack “educated thought” (“Rue Morgue,” p. 487). More than any other individual, Vidocq points to the French role in the development of policing and the emergence of the professional detective. Along with the strong tradition of French interest in rationalism and science, these associations made the story’s Paris setting seem both believable and appropriate to its American audience—despite Poe’s lack of firsthand knowledge about the French capital.

In general Poe’s short fiction was heavily influenced by the Gothic tradition of European literature, and Gothic features abound in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (two such features are a socially isolated, aristocratic hero and the gloomy mansion or castle he occupies). For the puzzle of the murder victim found in a locked room (an especially popular scenario for later detective stories), Poe may have drawn on a short story entitled “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1838), by the young Irish author J. Sheridan Le Fanu, subsequently known for his Gothic mystery novels. In Le Fanu’s story, however, the solution of the locked-room mystery is discovered by accident, not through the deductive abilities of an investigator. Poe’s “murderer” may have been inspired by an incident reported in the Shrewsbury (England) Chronicle in the summer of 1834. The newspaper recorded that, on entering her second-floor bedroom, a lady had been attacked by a baboon, which her husband then chased out the window. It was thought that the baboon, owned by performers in a traveling show, had been specially trained to burgle bedrooms by climbing up the outside wall and entering through the window, and that the lady had interrupted it during such a burglary. Poe may have been led to make the animal in his story into an orangutan by the display of a captive orangutan in Philadelphia in July 1839, which caused a sensation in that city at a time when Poe was living there.

Publication and impact

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first appeared in the April 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine, a monthly Philadelphia periodical that Poe edited from February 1841 to April 1842. The story was the first of several Poe stories that Graham’s published, including “A Descent into the Maëlstrom” (May 1841) and “The Masque of the Red Death” (May 1842). Poe’s stories helped make Graham’s into the nation’s leading monthly magazine during his tenure as editor, when its circulation soared from 5,000 to 40,000. Poe himself was becoming one of the nation’s most popular authors by the early 1840s.

Included in a collection of stories published serially in 1843 under the title Prose Romances, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was singled out by a review in the Pennsylvania Inquirer. Praising Poe’s originality, the anonymous reviewer wrote that the story “proves Mr Poe to be a man of genius. The inventive power exhibited is truly wonderful. At every step it whets the curiosity of the reader … with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel” (Pennsylvania Inquirer, p. 2).

Poe followed up “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with two more Dupin tales, “The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). But despite Dupin’s popularity, the detective gave rise to no similar characters in literature until the 1850s, when the English novelist Charles Dickens published Bleak House, featuring the famous Inspector Bucket. In the 1860s, the French writer Emile Gaboriau created another literary detective, Monsieur Lecoq, in L’Affaire Lerouge (1866; The Widow Lerouge). A few decades later, England’s Arthur Conan Doyle released the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891-92; also in Literature and Its Times), which boosted the character of the detective to preeminence in the literary marketplace. A key to Sherlock Holmes’s wide success was his affable and slower-witted companion Dr. Watson, who narrates the tales—a device inspired by the unnamed narrator in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and one copied by many later practitioners of the genre.

—Colin Wells

For More Information

Brand, Dana. The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Emsley, Clive. Policing and Its Context 1750-1870. New York: Schocken, 1983.

Irwin, John. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1885-1905. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.

New York Herald. “Trial of Jackson for Murder.” Herald, 23 September 1835, 2.

O’Brien, Frank M. The Story of the Sun. New York: D. Appleton, 1928.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In The Complete Stories. New York: Knopf, 1992.

_____. Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Price, Kenneth M., and Susan Belasco Smith, eds. Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.

Review of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” by Edgar Allan Poe. Pennsylvania Inquirer, 26 July 1843, 2.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988.