49) “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” by E.A.

Poe

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a murder-mystery short story by Edgar

Allen Poe.
The story follows two men, an unnamed narrator and an amateur detective
with powerful deductive reasoning skills named Auguste Dupin, referred to
throughout the story simply as Dupin. Dupin and the narrator become
obsessed with solving the brutal murder of two women, a mother and a
daughter, after reading accounts of it in the paper. Ultimately, Dupin
reaches out to G-, the head of police, to help him solve the case after the
police arrest someone whom Dupin believes to be innocent.
The story opens with a long section on the idea of deductive reasoning,
which the narrator admires in his companion, a man named Dupin whom
he first met during a long visit to Paris during which the men lived in an old,
empty mansion together and refused to engage with the world. During this
period, Dupin educated the narrator on the idea of deductive reasoning,
and demonstrates his power by correctly guessing how the narrator feels
about a certain stage actor based on some of the statements the narrator
has made on other subjects during their brief acquaintance.

On the last night of their time together, the narrator and Dupin pour over
accounts in the newspaper of a brutal double murder on the Rue Morgue, a
fictional street in Paris. A mother and her daughter were killed; the mother
died by strangulation and then had her throat cut in the back yard, and her
daughter was strangled and then stuffed into the chimney. On the fourth
floor of the house, police found a straight razor, a tuft of grey hair, and a
bag of coins on the floor behind a locked door. The only other information
the police have is the testimony of witnesses who claim to have heard one
male, French voice, and another voice that spoke a language no one could
identify in the room during the time of the murder.

The police are stumped, and the prefect of the police, G-, ultimately makes
the decision to arrest a man named Le Bon, a bank clerk who appears to
have no connection to the murder and who declares his innocence. Dupin
remembers that Le Bon did him a favor once, and he questions the police
in their decision to arrest the man. In defense of Le Bon, and because of
his skill at sleuthing, Dupin asks G- if he can help solve the case, and G-
reluctantly allows him to inspect the crime scene.

When Dupin visits the scene of the crime and inspects the grey hair and
other items found in the house, he immediately begins to doubt whether a
man could have committed the crime at all. Dupin wonders how any man
would have the strength to shove a fighting, fully-grown woman up a
chimney, or to slash a throat so brutally that a woman’s head would fall off
when moved. He also wonders about how the killer escaped, and begins to
think about the possibility that the killer has the special ability to climb and
jump from great distances – the powers that would be possessed by
another kind of primate, other than man. He tells the police that he believes
the murder was committed by an orangutan.

The police scoff at this deduction, but when Dupin sends out notice asking
if someone lost an orangutan, he gets word back from a sailor who had just
brought the primate from overseas. The sailor finally admits that he startled
the creature while it was pretending to shave its face using his straight
razor, and it ran to a neighbor’s house holding the razor in question. When
the mother saw the razor in the orangutan’s hand, she screamed, sending
the orangutan into a rage that caused him to murder both mother and
daughter. The sailor says he then found the animal, and climbed up the
lightning rod to catch him. The voice in a mysterious language the
neighbors heard was the sound of the hooting ape.

The case is solved, Le Bon goes free, and the sailor sells the orangutan. G-
becomes resentful of Dupin, who mocks his inability to think creatively.
Book Summary

The book starts with a polemic about analysis and analytics which the
author associates with chess and playing cards. The plot begins when the
author writes about Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin who he met in Paris.
Because a series of circumstances he lost his fortune, and the only luxury
he had in life were books. He and the author shared a love for books.

They’ve met in a library, and after that, they decided to live in Paris. They
were cut away from the world. They did not entertain guests and only spent
their time with a book and each other.

Dupin’s favorite part of the day was the night and the author bowed down
to that. Over the day they would close the blinds and make the room dark
to have a vision of night, and when the real dark came, they would go out
and talk.

Dupin was capable of perfectly spotting and following the author’s train of
thoughts. They were walking one night, and after 15 minutes of silence and
after that with just one sentence a conversation about Chantilly started. He
was a shoemaker who tried the theater and failed, and that conversation
led to the murders in Rue Morgue.

Mother and daughter were found dead. Corps of the daughter who was
strangled was pulled out of the chimney. Somebody cut the throat of the
mother, and when they moved her dead body, her head fell off her body.
The story was in the newspaper that the two of them were reading. There
was no indication of the murderer’s identity and the day later testimonies of
the witnesses were published.

Most of the testimonies were the same in everything with the exception of a
few facts. Some of the witnesses said that the mother was a fortune teller
and other denied it. The people that entered the house first in search of the
victims heard two voices. One of them was piercing, and the other one
was gruff. Everyone gave a different testimony about that. One of them
said that the voices belonged to somebody French and English and others
said that they were Italian.

Nobody knows how the perpetrators ran out of the house. The police
weren’t sure if it was a murder. The corps of the daughter stuck in the
chimney was bruised, and the mother’s bones were crushed, and her throat
was probably cut with a razor.

The police arrested Adolphe Le Bon even though it seems that no evidence
pointed to him. The author realized that Dupin started to get interested in
the case when the alleged murderer was arrested because he asked him
about his opinion on the murder. The author, same as the rest of Paris was
convinced that the case was unsolvable.

Dupin criticized the French police who bragged about their methods, and
he thought that their only good method was a good moment. He invites the
author to investigate the murder with him because Le Bon once did him a
favor he never forgot. He knew one of the investigators, so he got the
permission necessary to start their investigation.

They went to the crime scene and searched everything. The author didn’t
know why Dupin investigated with such interest. The author didn’t spot
anything different than the newspaper said.

Dupin got quiet about the murder until noon next day. He wanted to know if
the author saw anything unusual. Dupin thought that the newspapers were
guilty of the opinion of the police about the case being unsolvable. The
newspaper stated a lack of motives for the murder, different testimonies
about the voices and that that was causing the police to think that this case
is a dead end.
Dupin said that he’ll get to a solution or that he already knows it. The author
was amazed, and Dupin stated that he expects the perpetrator or the
accomplice. Because they had to keep him in both of them took their guns.

Dupin kept going on with his monolog about the murder. He pointed the
author to the fact that everyone agreed that one voice was French and that
nobody wanted to say that the other voice belonged to their country. All of
them pointed to the language that is not their even though they’ve never
heard it.

Also, he figured out that the perpetrators escaped through the window
when he carefully studied the room. He already made a theory about how
they got in and out, but the both of it required lots of handiness.

He also considered the great amount of money left in the house and the
strength necessary to get a body into a chimney. All of his observations
make the author believe that the perpetrator was a lunatic from the hospital
that was nearby.

Dupin proved his opinion to be wrong because the witnesses could tell
which nationality was lunatic and also Dupin took the hair that was in the
hand of the mother. It wasn’t even similar to human hair as the fingerprints
on the daughter’s neck weren’t human.

Dupin showed the author an article about an orangutan from the islands
whose fingerprint matches the one from the daughter’s neck.

The author still couldn’t understand the mystery of the two voices. Dupin
thought that there was a French man who knew about the murder but ran
away and also he thought that the orangutan was still walking free. He
placed an article in the newspaper that he had an orangutan in his
apartment that belonged to a sailor. He came to that conclusion when he
finds a ribbon tied into a specific knot that sailor know how to make.
His suspicions became real when they heard steps. A sailor came into their
apartment in search of an orangutan. He offered them money as a reward
for finding the animal. Instead of money, Dupin asked him to tell them
about the murder.

He went to the door and locked them and placed his gun on the table. The
sailor told them that he caught the animal with a friend that died. After his
death, he hid the orangutan in his apartment and found him one day trying
to shave probably because he saw the sailor doing it.

When he took out his whip, the animal ran out through the window. The
sailor followed him and the orangutan spotted the window. A murder
occurred there in the way Dupin described it. The owner caught the
orangutan, and Le Bon was released from the prison.