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The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Detective and Crime Fiction

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is Edgar Allan Poe's short story introducing C. Auguste Dupin, an eccentric Parisian amateur reasoner who solves a brutal locked-room double murder that has stumped the police, by reasoning from physical evidence and observed detail rather than confession or informant testimony. Poe's own term for Dupin's method was ratiocination, and the story's pairing of a brilliant amateur detective with an admiring, less perceptive narrator became the template later detective fiction, most famously Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, would follow closely enough that Doyle himself repeatedly acknowledged the debt.

Facts
Classification
Original Language
English 1
Composed, From (Year)
1841 1
Connections

Authored By

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

In Genre

The genre's founding work.

Source The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.View the Source
The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)
  • Lead
    published in Graham's Magazine in 1841
  • Original language statement
    "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by the American writer and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841.
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