I think I first read this story when I was around 8 years old, in a paperback of Poe’s selected tales that I got from that company that let you order books at school. I still have that book. Memories . . .

What I remember the most are two things: not really understanding all the talk about the different operations of the intellect that Dupin indulges in, and being terrified by imagining the horrors of the Rue Morgue, and especially Mademoiselle L’Espanaye being thrust up the chimney feet first.

Even reading it again today I was struck by just how violent a story it is, albeit often with the violence reported in an indirect way. The body in the chimney with its face “fearfully discolored,” eyeballs protruding, and tongue “partially bitten through.” Madame L’Espanaye nearly decapitated before being tossed out the window (“her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off”). The clump of hair pulled from a victim’s head that’s “clotted with fragments of flesh of the scalp.”

What the story is probably best known for though is giving birth to the genre of detective fiction. Indeed, Poe was so fast off the mark in this regard that C. Auguste Dupin never calls himself a detective, and some sources suggest the word wasn’t even in use yet.

Much as H. G. Wells would later invent many of the standard tropes of science fiction, from alien invasion to time travel, Poe established the fictional detective for years to come with Dupin. As Conan Doyle would say, Poe’s detective stories provided “a root from which a whole literature has developed.” The obvious follow-ups were Holmes and Poirot, and with their success the mold was set. The detective would be a brainy and eccentric amateur who takes pleasure in the game of solving crimes. He would enjoy showing up the plodding police (“The results attained by them are not unfrequently surprising, but, for the most part, are brought about by simple diligence and activity”). He would have a homosocial relationship with an amanuensis sidekick. At the end of the novel or story he would enjoy dramatically revealing his discoveries to an amazed audience.

There are clues provided here, most notably the emphasis on how all of the different witnesses testify to hearing a shrill voice speaking a foreign language that a cross-section of Europe can’t make any sense of. There’s a red herring in the business of the 4000 francs. There are quotable bits of wisdom offered up by Dupin. Example:  “There is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.” And another: Remarkable coincidences “happen to all of us every hour of our lives, without attracting even momentary notice. Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.”

What struck me re-reading the story this time was how closely the living situations of Dupin and the narrator mirror those of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter. Dupin and the narrator rent “a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.” It’s Paris’s answer to the House of Usher! The L’Espanayes also inhabit a giant pile, living alone as recluses in a kind of shabby gentility. In the haunted house of the Faubourg St. Germain they close the shutters at the first hint of dawn. In the Rue Morgue house the shutters are seldom opened, and what will transpire will be an early instance of the “locked-room” mystery. Of course this is a motif we see again and again throughout Poe – introversion taken to the extreme of being buried alive – but it’s double-barreled presence here was something I’d never noticed before. Which, in turn, leads you to wonder how the obsessions of such an idiosyncratic, downright weird personality ever went so mainstream. I guess, like Kafka, Poe’s unique and eccentric qualities were what made him a universal type and not just for an age but for all time.

Dupin index