The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a famous short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in Graham Magazine in 1841. It has been known as the first prototype of the modern detective story and is one of the most well-known works of its author. The Murders in the Rue Morgue concentrates around the mystic murder with the main protagonist named Dupin and the narrator, Dupin’s friend, whose presence allows the reader to disregard from Dupin’s head and in such a manner to keep an air of mystery around him. Dupin unties a complicated knot of the dreadful murder of two women and finds a real perpetrator of this awful crime just to his intellect and logic. However, such narration states an interesting problem. Even though the murder is handled by the police, Dupin decides to carry out his own investigation and, in doing so, shows not only simple curiousity, but lack of trust in authority as well.
In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe shows the distrust of the police’s abilities in several ways. First of all, it is worth noting that the main protagonist, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, is not a professional detective, and he does not work in the police. Of course, nowadays this does not seem to be strange, but, as it was mentioned above, The Murders in the Rue Morgue is the first representative of the detective story, and its main character could equally be a professional in his area of expertise and a representative of authority able to solve a case as part of his everyday occupation. Poe could enhance prestige of the police, but did not do that; Dupin is just an amateur, a talented one, but not accessory to the police directly.
The distrust is also shown in the words, which Poe, through his main characters, says about the police on the contrary with Dupin’s investigation. At first, Dupin and the narrator learn about the affair from the newspaper, and then start to follow its course curiously. After arresting and imprisoning Le Bon, one of the alleged criminals the police do not have convincing evidences against, Dupin says,
“We must not judge of the means by this shell of an examination. The Parisian police . . . are cunning, but no more. There is no method in their proceedings, beyond the method of the moment. They make a vast parade of measures . . . The results attained by them . . . are brought about by simple diligence and activity. When these qualities are unavailing, their schemes fail” (Poe 251).
Poe underlines inability of the police to come up to business wisely, shows their work for public acclaim and their desire not to solve a case and to find a real murderer, but to show themselves in the best light and to create the appearance of coordinated activities even if it is indeed not the same. The killing of two women, which happened in the Rue Morgue, is a difficult case, and its solution requires creative approach and pliancy of mind; according to Poe, the police are not able to display these skills and to use them properly.
In another scene, Dupin and the narrator come to the locale of the crime in order to look at it with their own eyes and to find any evidences the police could let slip. After finding one of the nails is broken, quoting the narrator, Poe states, “The murderers did escape from one of these windows. This being so, they could not have re-fastened the sashes from the inside, as they were found fastened; --the consideration which put a stop, through its obviousness, to the scrutiny of the police in this quarter” (Poe 256). In other words, in this scene the main characters find verifictions to suggested earlier suspitions in detective abilities of the police, and their mistrust becomes more feelable and significant. Then, stating his version of the affair, Dupin more than once emphasizes mistakes made by the police, for example, “blundering ideas of motives” that appear in “the heads of the police” after the words said by Mignaud, one of the attestors (Poe 259).
However, after solving the case, Dupin and the narrator do not claim for publicity and do not want the police to overtly admit their failure. Dupin adds some comments, but very likely they are not spiteful; at the end of the story, Dupin says that defeating the Prefect in his own castle is enough, and it is wondering how kind and tricky the police’s representative is. In other words, Dupin decides to held its own investigation because of his curiousity and desire to assist the police, not to confront them.
Of couse, a typical detective story is the one with an inability of public authorities to solve one or another case and their following need in enlisting the help of one or another outside but capable person, and lack of trust in police passes for normal nowadays. However, The Murders in the Rue Morgue was written at the first part of the nineteenth century, and those times such narration was a literary innovation. The lack of trust in authority is just the one side of a coin; the whole story is riddled with the theme of lack of patriotism. It appears in such elements as the scene – Poe was an American author, but The Murders in the Rue Morgue takes place in France, – the presence of foreigners unabled to understand each other, and lack of references to America at all. Faith in consistency of the government and its agencies is an essential part of patriotism, and, distrusting them, Dupin and the narrator start to seem non-patriotic. However, this mistrust balances on the edge with simple curiousity, and is not critical; the police are not too narrow to solve the case, they are just to tricky for it, and it is not actually that bad.
Works Cited
Poe, A. The Murder in the Rue Morgue. In Tales and Scethes by N. Hawthorne. New York, NY: Library of America, 1982. pp. 240-166.
