10/14/2022
Have you ever seen an orangutan at the zoo, in a magazine, or on TV? What did you think of this interesting and intelligent creature? One writer, Edgar Allan Poe, portrayed them a bit differently from what you’d expect – murderous! An orangutan became his prime murder suspect in his first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
In this fictional short story, Poe writes about C. Auguste Dupin, a Parisian man who tries to solve the horrific murder of two women inside their 4th-floor apartment. Oddly, the door was locked and showed no signs of forced entry. The sly criminal entered the women’s apartment through a window and proceeded to kill them, one woman with a straight razor and the other by strangling her. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer threw one of its victims out the window and stuffed the other up the chimney. After studying the clues, Dupin deduced that the crime was committed not by a human but rather by an orangutan that belonged to a sailor in Paris.
Poe wrote this story while living in Philadelphia. It appeared in Graham’s Magazine in 1841. Little did Poe realize he had started a new genre – the modern detective story. His creation inspired other fictional detectives, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. If you’re a fan of detective stories, you have Poe to thank.
(Image: 1870 Illustration “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” by Daniel Vierge)
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