AUTHOR: EDGAR ALLAN POE
DATE: 1841
‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is only a short story, first published in the American Graham’s Magazine, where its author worked at the time as an editor. Yet its influence belies its brevity. Not only did it spawn a new literary genre, detective fiction, that changed the world’s literary culture, but it reflected the growing concern of the Victorian world to confront and overcome the ‘social illness’ of criminality that haunted the popular psyche. In a post-Enlightenment world, the literary detective (of which Poe’s Dupin was the first great example) came to represent the triumph of reason, bringing order to a disordered world.
C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of the story, is an amateur sleuth. At the start of the narrative, he and the unnamed narrator learn from the newspaper about a strange double-murder in their native Paris. The victims, Mme. L’Espanaye and her daughter, have been discovered at their property on the Rue Morgue. The mother has suffered terrible injuries, including multiple fractures and a neck wound that severs her head. The daughter, meanwhile, is found strangled and stuffed down a chimney. Stranger still, the killings were apparently committed in a locked fourth-floor room. Inside the room is a razor, a quantity of grey hair and some gold coins. Eyewitnesses report having heard two voices, one French and the other speaking a language they cannot recognize. Through a process of ratiocination – an exacting form of reasoning based on close observation – Dupin manages to solve the case and identify the extraordinary culprit.
Poe was born in Boston in 1809 and emerged as one of the nation’s most significant writers, working across formats and genres. An established critic and poet and arguably the greatest short-story writer of his day, he was a pioneer of science fiction and a leading exponent of American Romanticism and the Gothic. Yet nothing outshone the success he enjoyed with Dupin, not only in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ but also in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’. It was the latter of these that Poe considered ‘perhaps the best of my tales of ratiocination’ but it was the first story, which was originally to have been called ‘Murders in the Rue Trianon’, that laid down the blueprint. Yet Poe never saw great financial rewards for his publishing success. He was paid an additional $56 by the magazine that already employed him for the rights to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ – a figure that admittedly dwarfed the paltry $9 he received on publication of his poetic masterpiece, ‘The Raven’.
The arrival of the first great literary detective had been a long time coming. One can see echoes of Dupin in, for example, the logical deductions of Voltaire’s Zadig back in 1747, although the latter’s intellectual feats were not directed towards solving crime but to addressing problems of philosophy. What crime writing did exist was epitomized by the sort of gory, melodramatic accounts of true-life crimes in publications like London’s Newgate Calendar, a monthly account produced by the keeper of Newgate Prison. The Calendar would in turn inspire the Newgate novels of the 1820s–40s that retold the histories of various criminals of the past.
William Godwin published Caleb Williams in 1794, with the main protagonist solving a crime but not through a process of intellectual detection. Instead, he alights on the culprit by recognizing the guilt contained in the emotional responses of the accused. Arguably the nearest we come to a genuine pre-Poe literary detective is Vidocq, who appeared in the Memoirs of Eugène François Vidocq in 1828. He was, in fact, a real person – a criminal turned police informant who rose to become head of the French national criminal investigations department and founded the world’s first private detective agency. His memoirs, though, strayed regularly into the field of fiction. It has even been suggested that Vidocq himself was behind several of the crimes that he later claimed to solve.
A STRANGE WAY TO GO
Poe’s death, when he was aged just forty, on 7 October 1849 was perhaps more mysterious than anything he wrote. Four days prior to his passing, he was discovered delirious on the streets of Baltimore, ‘in great distress, and … in need of immediate assistance’ according to one Joseph Walker, who discovered him. Poe was unable to explain how he came to be in this condition before he died, and the cause of death remains disputed. Various medical ailments have been suggested, from epilepsy to syphilis, while others have wondered whether he committed suicide or perhaps was murdered. It has even been suggested he might have been a victim of cooping – a form of electoral fraud where random voters are kidnapped and induced (for example, through enforced alcohol consumption or by beatings) to vote for a particular candidate.
Yet, seen as a literary creation, Vidocq displayed several of the traits of later detectives. For example, he minutely studied his crime scenes for clues and was an exponent of several cutting-edge forensic techniques, including ballistics and plaster-casting footprints. He also kept highly detailed records of crimes and liberally employed disguises. Relying on his initiative, he sifted evidence in a scientific manner, using his intellect to mine the data and unmask the wrongdoer. It was a fairly short leap of creative imagination to go from the semi-fictional Vidocq to the fully fictional Dupin.
And once Poe had opened the floodgates, there has been no stemming the tide of detective fiction, even to this day. There is, for instance, a clear lineage from Dupin to arguably the greatest literary detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes. His creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a self-confessed admirer of Poe, referring in his letters to ‘those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin’ and describing him as ‘the supreme original short story writer of all time’. Each of Poe’s stories of detection, Doyle said, ‘is a root from which a whole literature has developed … Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?’ Holmes even gives a (admittedly barbed) nod to his great forebear in the story that introduced him to the world, A Study in Scarlet. ‘Now, in my opinion,’ Holmes tells Watson, ‘Dupin was a very inferior fellow.’
In an era of rapidly increasing urbanization, Dupin and his literary descendants – whether in the hard-bitten noirs of Raymond Chandler or the Golden Age mysteries of Agatha Christie or any of the other myriad sub-genres that appeared – have allowed readers to stare into the criminal abyss from which they might shrink in real life and, in the end, to gain mastery over it. The modern world needed its detective-heroes and Dupin signposted the way.