Story Skeleton—The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. Our ongoing exploration now delves into mysteries, illustrating yet again the universality of story structure, albeit from a different angle.

By Michelle Barker

The First Modern Detective Story

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, has been called the first modern detective story. Poe’s biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, claims it “changed the history of world literature.” When Poe published it in 1841, the word “detective” did not exist.

The short story establishes several tropes in the genre. The main character, C. Auguste Dupin, is brilliant but odd, a clear prototype of Sherlock Holmes. He is not a professional detective but uses his ingenuity to follow cryptic clues and solve two murders. The first-person narration of the events by his close friend is another trope and calls to mind Arthur Conan Doyle’s use of Watson. As Picasso once said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Though Orson Welles also said, “I don’t think any artist can steal. If you take it from someone else and make it your own, it’s not stealing.”

Dupin announces his solution and then explains how he arrived at it—yet another trope. The story is the first locked room mystery ever written, in which a crime is committed in seemingly impossible circumstances—a room that apparently cannot be entered or exited without the person being seen. The police being unsympathetic to the detective is another trope that will be picked up by many mystery writers in the years to come.

Poe spends only a little time developing the friendship between the narrator and Dupin. This is really a story about how to think outside the box. Dupin is so talented, there’s no chance the reader will beat him to the solution. It calls to mind the coveted amazing detective slash genius award on the television series Brooklyn 99, which Dupin would clearly have won.

Plot Points

The Detective and His Methods

Poe opens the story with a long comparison of the various modes of thought required to play chess, draughts (checkers), and whist. It’s a strategy that caught on, because many modern mysteries open with a demonstration of how the detective thinks, what their method of solving a crime is—or even the code they live by. This functions as the stasis of the story and serves an introduction of the detective to the reader.

The focus in The Murders in Rue Morgue is on analysis. How to think if you want to solve a crime. It’s worth noting that when Poe wrote this story, cities were growing and crime was on the rise. Newspapers were already reporting on murders, trials, and police work, so he tapped into the public’s interest in how such crimes were solved. His conclusion: the amount of information one can derive from a particular set of circumstances depends on how well one observes. The key is in knowing what to look for.

The narrator and Dupin first meet in a library in Paris while both are in search of the same rare book. It’s a perfect friendship. Dupin is down on his luck financially and the narrator is able to rent a mansion for the two of them. The narrator is impressed by how well read Dupin is. They proceed to seclude themselves in this mansion, reading and writing by day and roaming the streets by night.

But we’re still nowhere near the murders in question. First, we must have a demonstration of Dupin’s ability to make intuitive connections—the detective’s methods. He appears to read the narrator’s mind by responding to a thought the narrator didn’t voice out loud. Dupin explains his circuitous thought process one inference at a time—an ability that he will call upon to solve the murders. It is yet another example of the detective and his methods.

The Initial Puzzle

Now that we know what kind of man we’re dealing with in Dupin, Poe reveals the story’s inciting incident: an article the two men come upon in the newspaper about the murders of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille. The locked-door circumstances are established: both the gateway and the fourth-floor door are locked (which is where the women live) and must be forced open.

According to the newspaper article, the situation is as follows:

• The room is in complete disarray but the valuables remain untouched.
• On the floor are a bloody razor and a hunk of grey human hair ripped out at the roots.
• The body of the daughter was forced up the chimney, head down, and is covered in scratches and bruises.
• The body of the mother is outside behind the house, throat cut and body mutilated.

Testimony from various witnesses sheds little light on the situation. Several people heard arguing and shrieking coming from the rooms. Two voices were discerned: one male and French, the other indecipherable. None of the witnesses could agree on the language being spoken by the second person or even if it was male or female.

The rooms were locked from the inside, as were all the windows, and the chimney is too narrow for someone to gain entry into the house. It took several people to pull the daughter’s body out of the small space.  If there was another person in the room, how did they get out? The mother’s body showed damage that could only have been done by a very strong man with a heavy weapon.

The scene seems to defy all rational explanation.

Case Accepted

In mysteries, the point of no return plot point tends to be a variation on the idea of the protagonist being locked into the story, unable to turn back. In the case of mysteries, it’s the point at which the detective confirms their commitment to the case, thus raising the stakes (often by making them personal).

When Adolphe Le Bon is arrested—the clerk who accompanied Madame L’Espanaye to her home with two large bags of money—we have our point of no return. Dupin’s interest in the case is no longer merely superficial. He knows Le Bon personally and feels he owes it to him to look into the case, so he arranges to visit the premises to study the crime scene. He doesn’t have faith in the methods of the police.

The narrative goal is implied: unlike the police, Dupin can think outside the box, and there’s a chance that if he puts his mind to this case, he can prove that Le Bon is innocent.

Gathering Evidence

In the rising action of the story, the narrator and Dupin examine the rooms and the bodies at the Rue Morgue in order to gather evidence. This is a common starting point for mystery authors.

Naturally, the narrator doesn’t notice anything other than what he already read in the newspaper. He is as bewildered by the situation as the police. Not so, Dupin. He tackles the mystery from the perspective of its presumed insolubility: in other words, it’s the very fact of the case’s impossibility that must lead one to assume this is something that has never happened before.

In modern detective fiction, the rising action might include a protracted gathering of clues, the interviewing of witnesses, and the slow piecing together of the crime. But this is a short story, so Poe has no real choice but to condense the process. While Dupin hedges a little about his solution to the case being a “hope” and a “guess,” he also claims to have already solved it. Since the focus of this story is on how to think in order to solve a puzzle, much of the rising action focuses on how he has arrived at his solution.

Dupin reasons as follows:

• Madame L’Espanaye couldn’t have had the strength to push her daughter’s body up the chimney, so there had to be a third person in the room.
• The voice of that third person is described as foreign but indecipherable. Nearly every witness claims it was a language they recognized but didn’t speak.
• The only way in or out of the rooms is by the windows, and while the police deem it impossible that they were used, Dupin examines the windows more closely and finds that while one of the nails looks intact, in fact it isn’t. Someone could have left the apartment through the window without anyone knowing.
• The only way up to the windows is via a lightning rod, which would require an extraordinary amount of agility.
• Money was clearly not the motive, as the two bags of gold remain untouched. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be any motive.
• The brutality of the murders and the ripped-out hair suggest extreme strength and ferocity.

When Dupin shows that the hair taken from Madame L’Espanaye’s hand is not human, nor is the handprint he traced from the bodies, the solution is revealed: the culprit is an orangutan. Random? Yes. Impossible to guess? Also yes. But such is Dupin’s brilliance.

Nabbing the Culprit

But the orangutan is still at large. Dupin places an ad in the newspaper announcing the capture of said orangutan in the hope of drawing out its owner whom he presumes to be a sailor, thanks to a ribbon he found beneath the lightning rod tied with a sailing knot. Worst case: the sailor might get his back up about the accusation of murder and become violent.  When a man arrives at the door, Dupin and the narrator ready their pistols.

During the climax of the story, Dupin’s brilliance is confirmed. When the sailor offers to pay a reward to get his orangutan back, Dupin makes his move, bringing out his pistol and demanding that the sailor tell him everything he knows about the murders.

The sailor claims his innocence and explains how the orangutan escaped from his enclosure with a razor. The sailor chased him and watched helplessly as the animal climbed up the lightning rod behind Madame L’Espanaye’s house and then wreaked havoc. It was the sailor’s voice exclaiming in horror when her body flew out the window.

In the resolution, Dupin goes to the police and succeeds in freeing his friend M. Le Bon, while the police can’t resist throwing in a comment about people minding their own business.

The Analysis *IS* the Plot

While the narrator is as baffled by the crime as the reader, there is never any real point at which Dupin doubts his own ability to solve the mystery (even if he feigns modesty from time to time). He never loses the case or has any moment where the clues don’t line up—other than when he first reads about it in the newspaper. As soon as he puts his intellect to the job, he solves the puzzle.

In many ways, this feels like merely the scaffolding of the mystery novels we now read, lacking the twists and turns we have come to expect, along with red herrings and misdirects. In today’s mysteries, a personal storyline involving the sleuth often intersects with the crime in question. Here, we have the crime, and the process of analysis that brings about its solution. And yes, a little trash talk of the police thrown in at the very end. But while the reader is given the opportunity to consider the clues, the chance that they’ll come up on their own with the solution of the orangutan is rather slim. The reader’s participation in that process is something that will develop with the genre over time.

Whodunit vs Whydunit

We often refer to mysteries as whodunits, but in fact, most modern mysteries are whydunits—a structural feature that Blake Snyder talks about in Save the Cat!

The surface question may be who committed the crime, but the real hook is why—and more specifically, the revelation that the motive is not what readers were led to believe. This approach allows for greater variation: the surprise isn’t just in who, but in the shifting context that transforms innocuous actions into damning evidence. The culprit might appear blameless until a hidden motive reframes everything.

Whodunits, by contrast, are more restrictive. The culprit must remain hidden despite a clear motive—leading to ever-wilder twists: a murderer who’s an orangutan (as in this story), a culprit revealed to be the narrator (Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), or, as in Murder on the Orient Express, everyone aboard the train.

Poe’s Legacy

Edgar Allan Poe's role in creating the modern detective story is honoured in the annual Edgar Awards which recognize the best mysteries in fiction, non-fiction, film, theatre, and television. It’s quite an achievement to create a new genre, one that has had remarkable staying power in its appeal to rationality, truth, and the challenge of a good puzzle.

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. She is the co-author of two craft books: Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.