The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales, Edgar Allan Poe’s Birth of the Detective Story
Three classic detective stories showcase the investigative powers of C. Auguste Dupin, a Frenchman of the nineteenth century: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter. These three pieces devoted to logical deduction make up the analytical tales of the Boston-born genius, and they invented a genre.
Author: Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Title: The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales
Format: English paperback (Modern Library Classics), 160 pages, introduction by Matthew Pearl
Contents: The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842), The Purloined Letter (1844)
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0679643427 (ASIN 0679643427)
The First Great Detective
In these stories Poe shows his perfectionist ambitions. Dupin is the clear forerunner of the investigator who would star in all later mystery fiction; he is the character who served as a model for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. The most gifted of pure reasoners, he prefers darkness to light and lives apart from the noise of the world.
Reason Alone
Guided only by his reasoning, he will discover that the murders in the Rue Morgue can only have been committed by an ape, and that there is no better hiding place for a letter than the one in plain sight.
The Invention of a Genre
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue", published in Graham’s Magazine in April 1841, is generally regarded as the first modern detective story. In a few pages Poe established conventions that writers still use: the brilliant, eccentric amateur detective; the admiring friend who narrates the case; the baffled official police; the locked room from which the murderer seems to have vanished; and the final explanation, in which the detective reveals how he reasoned his way to the truth. Poe called these stories "tales of ratiocination".
A Real Murder
"The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" is based on a real case: the death of Mary Rogers, a young woman who worked in a New York tobacco shop and whose body was found in the Hudson River in 1841. Poe moved the story to Paris and had Dupin solve it by reading the newspaper accounts, effectively offering his own solution to a real crime that the police had not solved. That makes it the slowest of the three stories, but historically one of the most interesting.
The Purloined Letter
"The Purloined Letter" (1844) is the shortest and most elegant of the three. A government minister has stolen a compromising letter from a royal lady, and the Paris police have searched his rooms inch by inch without success. Dupin reasons that the minister, a clever man, would not hide the letter at all, and he finds it in the most obvious place. The story has fascinated philosophers and psychoanalysts as well as mystery readers.
Poe’s Legacy
Arthur Conan Doyle openly acknowledged his debt to Poe, even though Sherlock Holmes dismisses Dupin as "a very inferior fellow" in A Study in Scarlet. The Mystery Writers of America named their annual awards the Edgars in Poe’s honour. Matthew Pearl, who introduces this edition, is himself the author of a novel about Poe’s death, The Poe Shadow.
Marie Rogêt
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt combines journalism and police intrigue. It deals with the murder of a beautiful young woman believed to be the victim of a gang of criminals. This time Dupin does not face an extraordinary case like the Rue Morgue but an ordinary one, which makes the solution harder, since the ordinary multiplies the number of hypotheses and possibilities. Short, dense and endlessly influential, these tales are essential for any lover of crime fiction.
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