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The Murders in the Rue Morgue & Other Tales
A new, beautifully laid-out, easy-to-read edition of Edgar Allan Poe's C. August Dupin trilogy -- the birth of detective fiction as a genre. This edition includes the following Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is regarded as a central figure of American literature, as one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and the inventor of detective fiction and science fiction as respective genres.
108 pages, Paperback
Published December 9, 2019
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About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,883 books28.8k followersThe name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 26, 2021
It’s fascinating to read tales written and published in the mid-1840s. Edgar Allan Poe tales are ideal for anyone studying criminal justice, criminal law. The writing can be boring at times but the words are expressive and not often heard in conversations today. It’s because we are consumed with television and smartphone media mania. In the 1840s it was all about writing, reading and intelligent conversation. Here are some of the lines I took from Edgar:
...to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other.
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.
...the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.
“The riddle, so far, was now unriddled.”
Nothing is more vague than impressions of individual identity.
“In that which I now propose, we will discard the interior points of this tragedy, and concentrate our attention upon its outskirts.”
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth, arises from the seemingly irrelevant. It is through the spirit of this principle, if not precisely through this letter, that modern science has resolved to calculate upon the unforeseen.
When arising of itself—when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner—we should look upon it as analogous with the intuition which is idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius.
Grass will grow, especially in warm and damp weather as much as two or three inches in a single day (such as was that of the period of the murder).
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 1844, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend in his little back library...
He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius.
...to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other.
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.
...the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.
“The riddle, so far, was now unriddled.”
Nothing is more vague than impressions of individual identity.
“In that which I now propose, we will discard the interior points of this tragedy, and concentrate our attention upon its outskirts.”
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth, arises from the seemingly irrelevant. It is through the spirit of this principle, if not precisely through this letter, that modern science has resolved to calculate upon the unforeseen.
When arising of itself—when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner—we should look upon it as analogous with the intuition which is idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius.
Grass will grow, especially in warm and damp weather as much as two or three inches in a single day (such as was that of the period of the murder).
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 1844, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend in his little back library...
He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius.
May 28, 2021
This book, The Murders in the Rue Morgue & Other Tales brings together three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, published between 1841 and 1844. I read the first eponymous story as part of the recommended reading for an online course on classic detective fiction, to be read in parallel with the Sherlock Holmes tale The Sign of Four, and was immediately struck by the similarities between Poe’s gentleman detective Dupin, along with his un-named friend and chronicler, and Sherlock and Watson. Dupin is a logical and scientific man, capable of using his deductive powers to solve a seemingly impossible crime, to the bafflement and awe of his friend and the local police.
The first of the three short stories featuring Dupin is, in my opinion, the most successful and the most enjoyable (although the ending is extremely fantastical!), particularly when read with The Sign of Four, which it strongly influenced. But on the whole I found the book interesting rather than enjoyable; to see the ideas we take for granted in detective fiction now in their infancy.
The first of the three short stories featuring Dupin is, in my opinion, the most successful and the most enjoyable (although the ending is extremely fantastical!), particularly when read with The Sign of Four, which it strongly influenced. But on the whole I found the book interesting rather than enjoyable; to see the ideas we take for granted in detective fiction now in their infancy.
September 6, 2025
this was so good until it was revealed that the killer was an orangutan..like?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews