chess player

Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 1895 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue“

starts out with a proposition: there are two modes of untangling a problem. The first is that of the chess player, who looks at all the pieces on a board and decides, from the way everything is laid out, what to do next. The second is that of the whist player (whist, by the way, is like bridge, a game with four players that depends on working out what cards your opponents are holding).The whist player not only has to memorize the rules and moves of the game (like the chess player) but she also has to figure out, or deduce, from watching her fellow players, what cards they have. This kind of analysis takes both imagination and reason – and it’s this kind of intelligence that we’re supposed to see in this story. (Check out our “In a Nutshell” for more on Poe and “tales of ratiocination” to see why this argument is important.)

If you’re looking for someone who has this whist-player-style analytical intelligence, look no further than our young, sarcastic protagonist, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, a Parisian gentleman fallen on hard times. Dupin’s love of detecting leads him to a case that both the newspapers and the police themselves have declared unsolvable: the murders in the Rue Morgue (a.k.a. Morgue Street).

The title of the story is straightforward — that is, the murders take place in the street (the Rue) of the Morgue. In the opening section of the story, Poe offers some of the views expressed above about the need of the detective to be observant (more than the ordinary person), and, furthermore, he must know what to observe. The most casual movement or expression can often reveal more than the magnifying glass which M. Dupin never uses, even though the police constantly rely on one to help them solve crimes. And also too, the superlative detective must be able to make the proper inferences from the things he observes. Here is where ingenuity becomes the most important aspect in solving a crime.

The narrator first met Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin when they were looking for a rare volume in a library; shortly, therefore, they became friends and shared an old house together. In later detective fiction, this convention is repeated; the brilliant detective and his sidekick will often share the same living abode. The narrator then gives us an example of M. Dupin’s brilliant analytical ability. Strolling along the street one night, the narrator is thinking about a certain actor, and suddenly M. Dupin answers without the narrator’s ever having asked anything. Then M. Dupin explains how through the logic of their previous conversation and by observing certain actions in his friend’s movements, he was able to deduce at what point his friend had come to a certain conclusion.