The Murders in the Rue MorgueEdgar Allan Poe

'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' is, without question, the single most important story in the history of mystery fiction. In these few pages, Edgar Allan Poe (1809--1849) invented most of the significant elements in a literary form that relied on this template for the next one hundred seventy years: the brilliant detective, his somewhat dimmer sidekick, the still dimmer official police, the apparently impossible crime, misleading clues, the observation of disparate bits of information and the inspired deduction that results, and the denouement in which all is made clear.

Born in Boston and orphaned at the age of two when both of his parents died of tuberculosis, Poe was taken in by a wealthy merchant, John Allan, and his wife, although never legally adopted, Poe nonetheless took Allan for his name. He received a classical education in Scotland and England from 1815 to 1820. After returning to the United States, he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). It, and his next two volumes of poetry, were financial disasters. He won a prize for his story 'MS. Found in a Bottle' (1833) and began a series of jobs as editor and critic of several periodicals. While he dramatically increased their circulations, his alcoholism, strong views, and arrogance enraged his bosses, costing him one job after another. He married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, living in abject poverty for many years with her and her mother. Lack of money undoubtedly contributed to the death of his wife at twenty-four. The most brilliant literary critic of his time, the master of horror stories, the poet whose work remains familiar and beloved to the present day, and the inventor of the detective story, Poe died a pauper.

'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' was first published in the April 1841 issue of Graham's Magazine. It was first published in book form (if a forty-eight-page pamphlet may be counted as a book) in a very rare volume (a copy in collectors' condition would sell for at least two hundred fifty thousand dollars) titled Prose Romances (Philadelphia, Graham, 1843), which also contains 'The Man That Was Used Up.' It then was collected in Tales (New York, Wiley & Putnam, 1845).

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Edgar Allan Poe

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

--Sir Thomas Browne

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics, exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension prternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one, without effort at the other....