# Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

> Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, first published Apr 1841: publication record, synopsis, a verified quotation and sources.

Canonical page: https://lineageofshadows.com/works/murders-in-the-rue-morgue/

Title: The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Form: Short story
First appearance: Apr 1841 (timeline year 1841)
Themes: Detection, The city

## Publication record

- Story, Apr 1841: Graham's Magazine. April 1841 number (vol. 18, pp. 166-179). Often called the first modern detective story (the phrase used by the Poe Society chronology, which lists it under April 1841). [1, 2, 3]

## Synopsis

In Paris a nameless narrator shares a shuttered, candlelit house with C. Auguste Dupin, a ruined gentleman who loves the night and the pleasures of analysis. When a mother and her daughter are found dead in a locked fourth-floor room on the Rue Morgue, one of them thrust head-down up a chimney, the police arrest an innocent clerk. Dupin reads the newspapers and then the room itself. He asks which details every witness agrees upon, and which none can explain, and arrives at a conclusion stranger than any the prefect has offered.

## Setting

Paris, in the spring and part of the summer of '18--' (year left blank by Poe). Places: Paris; the Rue Morgue; the Faubourg St. Germain; the Rue Montmartre [4]

## From the text

> Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen—although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect.

Opening section, after the preamble on analysis. Project Gutenberg ebook #2147: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2147 (Gutenberg #2147, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1 (Raven edition text))

## Facts

- The story ran in the April 1841 number of Graham's Magazine, vol. 18, pages 166 to 179; the story is often called the first modern detective story (the Poe Society chronology's phrase), and Mabbott writes that it 'may not be the first detective story' but is the first deliberately written as such to win worldwide popularity. [1, 3]
- Writing to Philip Pendleton Cooke on 9 August 1846, Poe said of these stories: 'These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key.' [1]
- Mabbott judges that Poe's Dupin was almost surely named for André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin (1783-1865), a French politician described in a book Poe reviewed in the same issue of Graham's, while adding that Dupin is a common name in France. [1]
- French newspaper versions of the tale were appearing by June 1846 (La Quotidienne, followed by Le Commerce in October), and Charles Baudelaire's translation ran in Le Pays in February-March 1855 before appearing in Histoires extraordinaires (1856). [2]

## Threads in

- Answers: Eugène-François Vidocq (the French police chief and memoirist): In the story Dupin says Vidocq 'was a good guesser and a persevering man' who, 'without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations', setting analysis against the practical policeman. [4, 1]

## Threads out

- Leads to: [Sherlock Holmes](https://lineageofshadows.com/works/sherlock-holmes/). Doyle named Poe's C. Auguste Dupin as the best detective in fiction in 1892, and Watson compares Holmes to Dupin in A Study in Scarlet. [5, 6]
- Its tradition continues in: [The Moonstone](https://lineageofshadows.com/works/the-moonstone/). Martha Hailey DuBose writes that Poe, with 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) and his later tales, 'carved out the fundamentals of the genre' and that Collins 'made the next real breakthrough in detective fiction after Poe' with The Moonstone in 1868; a genre-level succession, not a claim that Collins borrowed from the story. [7]

## Notes on dates and attribution

- Day of publication: the Mabbott page says the story was 'received enthusiastically when published on March 15, 1841', while citing the April 1841 Graham's number; the Poe Society chronology says April 1841. The April 1841 issue (month only) is shown.
- Primacy: Mabbott writes 'It may not be the first detective story, but it is the first story deliberately written as such to attain worldwide popularity'; the chronology calls it 'the first modern detective story'. Hence the wording here: 'often called the first modern detective story'.

## Sources

1. Mabbott, textual introduction and notes to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe vol. II. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom2t043.htm (accessed 2026-10-09)
2. The Murders in the Rue Morgue: publication and translation history. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. https://www.eapoe.org/works/info/pt030.htm (accessed 2026-10-09)
3. Chronology of Poe's life and works. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. https://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poechron.htm (accessed 2026-10-09)
4. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 1 (Project Gutenberg ebook 2147; contains 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2147 (accessed 2026-10-09)
5. Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia (collects Doyle's statements on Poe and Dupin, 1892 to 1930). Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia. https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe (accessed 2026-10-09)
6. A Study in Scarlet (ebook 244). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/244/pg244.txt (accessed 2026-10-09)
7. Martha Hailey DuBose, Women of Mystery (St. Martin's Press, 2000), sample text (Poe's 1841 blueprint; Collins 'the next real breakthrough'). Library of Congress (catalog enhancement). https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1109/00040240-s.html (accessed 2026-10-09)