Short Story: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Overview
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" presents a tightly plotted mystery set in Paris and narrated by an unnamed friend of C. Auguste Dupin. The tale opens with a sensational double homicide that leaves the public and the police baffled: a woman and her daughter are found brutally murdered in a locked room, with impossible evidence and contradictory witness statements. Dupin applies calm, penetrating analysis to unravel a problem that appears to defy ordinary explanation.
The story combines grisly detail, forensic observation, and intellectual play. It contrasts sensational newspaper coverage and police frustration with Dupin's cool method of reasoning, showcasing a shift from brute force to ratiocination as the path to truth.

Plot Summary
A violent scene is discovered in a fourth-floor room on the Rue Morgue: the mother and daughter have suffered horrific injuries, the room is in chaos, and the window seems to be the only possible point of ingress or egress. Neighbors report hearing screams and a strange voice in the hours before the bodies are found, but their descriptions conflict, leading authorities down false trails. The police follow leads and arrest a suspicious man, yet no coherent motive or plausible human perpetrator emerges.
The narrator recounts Dupin's investigation, which proceeds through careful attention to overlooked details. Dupin revisits the scene on paper, reconstructs the physical facts, and examines the logic of witness testimony. He demonstrates how appearances and assumptions mislead investigators, then turns a single surprising observation into the key that unlocks the mystery.

The Detective Method
Dupin's approach exemplifies "analysis ratiocination": a blend of close observation, imaginative reconstruction, and deductive reasoning. He treats the mystery like a puzzle, isolating facts from sensational embellishment and testing hypotheses against physical evidence. Dupin shows how different perspectives produce contradictory reports and how an apparently insoluble problem can yield when the right frame of reference is applied.
The story emphasizes mental discipline over procedural routine. Dupin's knack for seeing what others miss, his willingness to consider unconventional explanations, and his use of demonstration as persuasion all establish a model for later fictional detectives. The narrator's admiration and occasional bafflement underline Dupin's intellectual dominance.

Resolution and Culprit
Dupin's solution upends expectations: the murderer is not human. Through the accumulation of clues and a careful reading of witness statements, Dupin concludes that the perpetrator was an escaped orangutan, acting with animal strength and instinct rather than motive. The apparently contradictory voices and the manner of the wounds make sense once the possibility of a nonhuman actor is entertained.
The revelation is both startling and darkly ironic. The story moves from ghastly tableau to a calm explanation that removes malice and replaces it with tragic mischance, while still accounting for the physical brutality of the crime.

Themes and Legacy
Beyond its immediate plot, the narrative explores limits of perception, the slipperiness of testimony, and the difference between sensationalism and genuine understanding. It critiques confident, surface-level conclusions and celebrates a rational, almost scientific mode of inquiry. The interplay between narrator and detective also establishes a model for companionship and narrative framing that recurs in detective fiction.
Widely regarded as the first modern detective story, the tale set enduring conventions: a brilliant amateur sleuth, a perplexing locked-room crime, methodical deduction, and a final reveal that reframes what came before. Its influence appears in countless subsequent mysteries, and its portrait of analytical intelligence remains a powerful template for the genre.