Pranav M S Krishnan's Key Ideas from The Murders in the Rue Morgue
by Edgar Allan Poe

At 3 AM, a mother and daughter are savagely murdered inside a locked fourth-floor apartment in Paris.

A woman is found decapitated on the street, her daughter stuffed up a chimney.

Neighbors heard two voices: one French male, one shrill and foreign. But no one else is found inside.

It seems impossible — but Dupin sees what others cannot.

Dupin’s brilliance lies in “ratiocination”: a method of analytical reasoning.

Instead of just asking what happened, he asks:

“What has happened that has never happened before?”

This logic helps him piece together the bizarre and seemingly inhuman clues.

A man known to Dupin is arrested, though he’s clearly innocent.

The media and police are baffled — but Dupin’s patient deduction reveals an unexpected truth.

He proves not only the man’s innocence but exposes how narrow thinking leads to false conclusions.

Spoiler: the killer isn’t human. It’s an escaped orangutan mimicking violence it had seen.

Poe’s twist was unheard of in 1841 — and showed the power of rational thought in untangling chaos.

Rue Morgue didn’t just solve a crime — it redefined how stories could think.

Poe’s work started it all: the mystery genre, the detective sidekick, and the locked-room puzzle.

If you love Sherlock, Agatha Christie, or Knives Out — it all began here.