At some point in your life you will have learned of this story, you will most likely not recollect when and how you learn of it, but you know of the story. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is one of those stories that is part of the zeitgeist of humanity. It is a story so intrinsic to our collective culture, so ingrain within us, so referenced and repeated, that it exists beyond itself.

This is not the only story penned by our own Dear Edgar of which this can be said. The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-tale Heart among others all exist in this strangely wonderful state of being known by us all, generally learned of in childhood somehow, in the same way as we absorb with the rest of our cultural consciousness. This is true throughout western culture, and within the western culture zeitgeist I am including Japan, South Korea and other places whence a commonality of literary architypes has grown. Edgar Allen Poe’s stories have been around a long time and they are no longer merely stories, they have becomes part of our collective consciousness.

That said, this might just be me…

‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ were ‘committed’ by an escaped orangutan. I say this certain in my own mind that you already know this. That in fact everyone knows this, or at least everyone likely to be reading this knows this. It is one of those things we, the collective hive mind of humanity, know. If I am wrong about this, and you’re not aware of this basic ‘known’ , my apologies for the spoiler. However, in my defense, reveling who, or in this case what, committed the murders in Poe’s fictional Parisian street isn’t really central to the story. It is just the part of the story we all know in our collective zeitgeist.

The real story in this tale is instead about how Poe’s amateur sleuth Auguste Dupin deduces this to be the case. The revel is not the conclusion, merely the point from which Dupin starts to explain how he deduced the truth of the matter. A common structure to just about every successful detective story (and by coincidence heist movies). Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Philip Marlowe, all reveal the culprit then explain how they cleverly figured out it was them. Which always comes down to a series of seemingly unconnected facts they have observed, through out the telling of the story. Little facts that are placed before the reader in slightly disguised ways so as to not seem important. Clues to the mystery that taken in isolation mean little but when the detective puts them all together the conclusion becomes obvious and undeniable. Even Dirk Gently does it this way. With Dupin however, Poe did it first.

In creating Dupin, Poe created an architype, not so much in the character of Dupin himself, though the aloof intellectual who coldly observes the smallest details, has little respect for the authorities, bored with the world in general and processing a superior attitude all round, has certainly been copied more than once. The same can be said for the way the tale is presented to us. Narrated by the detectives companion, a man of lesser intellectual gifts often astounded by how his friend reaches his conclusions despite the ‘detective’ oft insisting that they were obvious, if not ‘elementary’.

Auguste Dupin is, frankly, one screeching violin and a heroin addiction away from being Sherlock Holmes. Much like Holmes he is not a professional detective as such, and investigated the murder as much for his personal amusement as anything else, and while we know nothing much about the narrator, not even his name, he is the precursor of Doctor Watson and plays Watsons role of biograph and foil to the detective. This is not to say Conan Doyle ripped off Poe when he created Sherlock. Dupin appears in only three short stories by Poe, This one, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’. So while he is a well rounded character, his legacy is hardly extensive. Instead what Sir Arthur did was take Poe’s idea and build upon it, some might say not unreasonably Doyle perfected it, but without Dupin there may never of been a Sherlock Holmes.

All that said, The Murders in the Rue Morgue is an imperfect progenitor of the detective story. It suffers from the annoying habit of our Dear Edgar that was becoming more prevalent the more successful his works became. The habit of long winded introductory sections to a story that have little if any real relevance to the heart of the tale. The previous tale ‘The Man of the Crowd’ did this, ‘William Wilson’ did much the same, even the otherwise sublime ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ suffered from it to a lesser degree. If Poe was writing today and submitted one of his tales to an anthology I suspect he would receive a rejection email or two telling him they loved the story but he needs to shed a thousand or so words from the beginning and get on with the real story.

He does this a lot and I suspect this has a great deal to do with writers at the time often being paid by the word for copy. That he was also editorial staff for many of the periodicals he first published tales in suggest no one was acting as editor here either.

This is not to say there is nothing interesting and engaging about the first third of this tale, there is a lot of set up in regards to Dupin’s methods of detection, but it could have been weaved into the story of the murders themselves with ease, and made of a more engaging tale as a whole, instead as a reader its a bit of a chore getting through the first several pages before the story really begins. But when it does begin it becomes a masterful construction, placing all the clues before the reader, half hidden in plain sight. And yes, due to the whole zeitgeist thing we all know when reading this who committed the murders anyway, but even so the weaving of clues throughout Dupins’s investigation is perfection. A perfection that the reader comes to understand after the culprit is revealed and Dupin reveals his deducted truth.

It is easy to understand how our dear Edgar created a new genre of story, the detective story, with this tale. the seeds of the great detective novels Christie, Doyle and others are all there. The zeitgeist of Western culture owes Poe a debt it could never repay for Dupin. Imperfect it may, this is the tale that took us all to Baker Street, and its influence continues including the Holmes and Watson style dynamic of the exceptional and his more mundane colleague, which I quite happily ‘borrowed’ for my own creations Lucifer Mandrake and Sir William Forshaw.

It doesn’t matter that we all know the ape did it, the story is not about the murder but about how the detective discovers the truth. And it that the tale is a vibrant today as it was it was first published back in 1841.

A MURDER OF RAVENS, OBVIOUSLY, BUT LOSING ONE FOR THAT LONG DRAWN OUT FIRST THIRD.

Should you read it : It is, as I say, part of our collective culture, so yes clearly you should.

Should you not read it: There is no issues as such, but if you want to skip forward to the part where Dupin first reads of the Murders that have occurred in the Rue Morgue in the newspaper (which I suspect is where a Conan Doyle story would have started) no one would blame you.

Bluffers fact: Back to Sherlock, because without Dupin, Benedict Cumberbatch might never of become famous enough to be hired by marvel studios to play Doctor Strange. Which begs the question, who could have played Stephen Strange better? I can’t think of anyone, so I believe we all owe Poe a big thankyou for that.