Works · Short story · 1841

Murders in the Rue Morgue

First appeared Apr 1841 in Graham's Magazine

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Full title: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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.

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. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #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]

Setting

Paris, in the spring and part of the summer of ‘18--‘ (year left blank by Poe)[4]

Paris
the Rue Morgue
the Faubourg St. Germain
the Rue Montmartre

Themes

Notes on dates 2 notes on disputed 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’.

Threads

Threads in

Answers Eugène-François Vidocq (the French police chief and memoirist) (outside this timeline)
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

Its tradition continues in The Moonstone 1868
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.[5]
Leads to Sherlock Holmes 1887
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.[6][7]

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1841, and the other writers alive when Murders in the Rue Morgue appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).