What do you think?
Rate this book
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
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
10.2k books29.1k 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...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 22, 2026
A series of three detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
The first, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, made for an interesting mystery, although I found the ending, with the crime genre somewhat advanced since Poe's time, to be disappointing, verging on the ridiculous; one can however imagine that contemporary readers of the story may well have delighted in the ingenuity of the solution, so perhaps it must be read as emblematic of its time.
The second, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, is a tale of deduction with a more typical (and thus understandable) case. Certainly more satisfying than the first of the trilogy, its weakness lies in its lack of real conclusion - first the evidence is presented, its veracity is then analysed and the protagonist proceeds to make his deductions, which turn out to be true, he gets a reward and the tale ends. An improvement, but the story suffers a little from the mode of its telling.
The third, The Purloined Letter, is the strongest, in my opinion, of the three. Short and sweet, there are no big surprises here, but the form is more appealing, feeling more well-rounded like an A.C. Doyle story, and at no point is the reader disappointed to learn the culprit was a monkey.
Overall, my impression was positive, though my advice would be to read only The Purloined Letter and leave it at that.
This particular edition from Amazon has an inexcusable amount of printing errors, so much so for such a small text that one can only assume it was not meaningfully proof-read. Don't give Amazon money like me to buy a poor quality print of a work already in the public domain. Other better options are available.
The first, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, made for an interesting mystery, although I found the ending, with the crime genre somewhat advanced since Poe's time, to be disappointing, verging on the ridiculous; one can however imagine that contemporary readers of the story may well have delighted in the ingenuity of the solution, so perhaps it must be read as emblematic of its time.
The second, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, is a tale of deduction with a more typical (and thus understandable) case. Certainly more satisfying than the first of the trilogy, its weakness lies in its lack of real conclusion - first the evidence is presented, its veracity is then analysed and the protagonist proceeds to make his deductions, which turn out to be true, he gets a reward and the tale ends. An improvement, but the story suffers a little from the mode of its telling.
The third, The Purloined Letter, is the strongest, in my opinion, of the three. Short and sweet, there are no big surprises here, but the form is more appealing, feeling more well-rounded like an A.C. Doyle story, and at no point is the reader disappointed to learn the culprit was a monkey.
Overall, my impression was positive, though my advice would be to read only The Purloined Letter and leave it at that.
This particular edition from Amazon has an inexcusable amount of printing errors, so much so for such a small text that one can only assume it was not meaningfully proof-read. Don't give Amazon money like me to buy a poor quality print of a work already in the public domain. Other better options are available.
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.
April 18, 2026
I read this collection of Poe's C Auguste Dupin detective stories as part of a reading challenge that called for a "genre-defining" read. As Poe, not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was the author who introduced the modern detective, I figured I would give these a read. I'm fairly certain I've read The Murders in the Rue Morgue before; I certainly knew the premise (and the "twist" as well). And I enjoyed The Purloined Letter, which is the third installment. But I struggled with the second story, The Murder of Marie Roget. It felt interminably long, even though the entire collection is only about 100 pages. This story takes up about half the page length, and much of it is devoted to recounting newspaper articles, and gleaning info from them, because Dupin does all his sleuthing from his armchair. It's not like the first or third story where he is invited into the investigation in a meaningful way. But what I think is the real issue is that while Marie Roget is a character Poe invented, he based her, and her demise, on a real woman's story. And a deathbed confession as to what really happened to Mary Rodgers (she died from a botched abortion, not murder) threw a wrench in Poe's story planning. So the story just isn't "great." Although it's extremely important from a literary history perspective, as it is the first "true crime" story.
Also, while this is of no reflection on Poe's writing, this particular edition has several copy errors in it. So do grab a printing from a better, more reputable publisher.
Also, while this is of no reflection on Poe's writing, this particular edition has several copy errors in it. So do grab a printing from a better, more reputable publisher.
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 - 7 of 7 reviews