The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Poe was an editor at Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia when he wrote the story. The story ran in the April 1841 issue, which went on sale in the middle of March. The manuscript survives in the Free Library of Philadelphia. The manuscript has more crossings-out than most of Poe's, and Thomas Ollive Mabbott, who edited the standard scholarly edition of Poe's tales, concluded that Poe wrote the story in a hurry.[1]

In July 1843 a Philadelphia publisher, William H. Graham, brought the story out as a thin book in paper covers. The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, No. I cost twelve and a half cents and held two stories, this one and The Man That Was Used Up. No second number ever appeared. About fourteen copies survive, and one sold at Christie's in December 2000 for $259,000.[2] Poe collected the story again in Tales in 1845, with many small revisions.[2][3]

Poe had never been to Paris. After a childhood stay in England and Scotland he never left the United States again.[4] His Paris is built from real names used loosely. The Palais Royal, the Théâtre des Variétés and the Jardin des Plantes are real, and so are the Rue Montmartre, the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch. Mabbott notes that Poe borrowed those street names "with little regard for geography."[1]

The Rue Morgue itself is invented, and named after the Paris mortuary. In the manuscript Poe first called it the Rue Trianon, and he changed the name when the story was almost finished. Mabbott thought Dupin's unusual first names came from C. Auguste Dubouchet, a man Poe knew who was looking for work as a French teacher. The surname probably came from André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin, a French politician Poe had read about in a book he reviewed in the same issue of Graham's.[1]

The story opens with a few pages on what Poe calls the analytical mind, and on why a good whist player notices more than a good chess player. Then the narrator, a visitor to Paris, explains how he met Dupin. The two were hunting for the same rare book in a small library in the Rue Montmartre. They took a crumbling old house together in the Faubourg St. Germain, kept the shutters closed all day, and went out walking at night.[5]

One night Dupin answers a thought the narrator never said out loud, about a cobbler named Chantilly who had tried to become a tragic actor. Dupin then retraces every step of his friend's thinking over the last fifteen minutes. The chain began when a fruit-seller knocked the narrator onto a pile of paving stones.[5]

Soon afterwards the evening paper reports a horror in the Rue Morgue. At three in the morning neighbours heard shrieks from the fourth floor of a house belonging to Madame L'Espanaye, who lived there with her daughter Camille. They broke in and found the back room wrecked and locked from inside. A bloody razor lay on a chair, and thick grey hair torn out by the roots lay on the hearth. Nearly four thousand francs in gold were still on the floor in two bags.[5]

The daughter's body had been forced head downwards up the chimney. The mother lay in the yard behind the house, her throat cut so deeply that her head fell off when she was lifted. On the stairs, the neighbours had heard two voices. One was a gruff Frenchman swearing. The other was shrill, and every witness took it for a different foreign language, one he did not speak himself.[5]

The police arrest Adolphe Le Bon, the bank clerk who delivered the gold three days earlier. Dupin once owed Le Bon a favour, so he gets permission from the Prefect of Police to see the house. He studies the street, the back of the building and the rooms, and says nothing until the next day. Then he explains his reasoning while waiting, pistols ready, for a visitor he expects to answer a newspaper advertisement.[5]