Literary Firsts: "The Murders at the Rue Morgue"

In April of 1841, the world's first detective story was published. It featured a sleuth with great analytical prowess, who could deduce the most surprising details in an instant, and was narrated by the detective's closest companion and greatest fan. The story detailed a bizarre and seemingly impossible crime set in a great metropolitan city that could only be solved by one man: C. Auguste Dupin.

If you thought I was going to say Sherlock Holmes, you'd be off by more than 40 years—Arthur Conan Doyle's famed detective didn't hit the broadsheets until 1887. The man who got there first was Edgar Allan Poe, who is known more for his gothic poetry and tragic prose than for his cunning Parisian detective. He only wrote three short stories featuring Dupin: "The Murders at the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Roget", and "The Purloined Letter"; the first of these is the subject of today's post.

I will be revealing spoilers for the mystery, so if you want to avoid these you can read "The Murders at the Rue Morgue" online via Project Gutenberg first. It's not a long story, though it does take a little bit to get started.

The first detective story sets off as many of its successors do: with murder. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter are found dead in their home, their bodies horribly mangled. There is no way the perpetrator could have entered the building unseen (and they definitely were not), nor is it humanly possible to enter the space via a window. The police are thoroughly stumped: who could possibly commit such a crime, and how?

Enter the detective.

Over the decades to come, the genre would produce detectives of all shapes and sizes, from priests to fops, dashing policemen to nosy little old ladies. The most classic image of a detective, though, is the consultant: a private citizen who is ready and able to step in to give the police a hand whenever they get stuck on a case (which seems to happen frequently). Poe's Dupin is the first of these, though not the most famous. That honour goes to Holmes, though it is interesting to note how many similarities he shares with Dupin—it definitely looks like Conan Doyle took some inspiration from Poe's work.

Back at the Rue Morgue, however, there is a crime to solve. As Dupin starts to unravel the mystery of the murder and lay out the facts, it becomes more and more clear that this is no run-of-the-mill killer. They showed superhuman strength and agility, an inhuman grip... in fact, they aren't even human at all! From the likes of Poe, one may expect something supernatural, but instead he reaches for something slightly more mundane; many detective stories that have been written since, such as The Hound of the Baskervilles, follow a similar line of hinting at the prospect of otherworldly forces which turn out to be perfectly explicable. Magic and deduction make for tricky bedfellows.

So if Poe hasn't left the realm of reality, who—what—could his unknown murderer be? Once again, he sets a standard for the emerging genre by turning to the exotic. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, European and American explorers were discovering corners of the globe they'd never seen before, as well as exciting new creatures, substances, and peoples. A guaranteed way for mystery writers to surprise their readers during this period was to make use of some of these new discoveries in their stories (which can at times be uncomfortable to read with our modern eyes and sensibilities). And the discovery that Poe chose to include in "The Murders at the Rue Morgue" was the piece of the puzzle you've been waiting for, the murderer itself: an orangutan.

Even though this story was only the first of a brand new genre, we can already see the conventions that would come to define detective fiction taking shape in "The Murders at the Rue Morgue". Even though Poe did not contribute many stories to the field before his untimely death in 1849, he certainly left a strong influence for other writers to follow.