The Murders in the Rue Morgue

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe

The Beginning

Write the answer on a sheet of properly headed loose leaf. You may use the story to help you.

1-According to the passage, the process of analyzing is observing one’s surroundings, the details and how they fit into the “big picture”.

2- The game of “draughts” is the same as the game of checkers.

3- The author most likely wrote the introduction to the story to explain and give examples of analytical deduction because this is the method the detective uses to solve the “impossible” murder. Since this was the first detective story ever written, people were not familiar with this method of thinking.

4- A charlatan is a fake or a fraud.

5- Dupin is the main character and “our” detective. He is important because he is the prototype for all detectives including Sherlock Holmes who was introduced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, almost 40 years after Poe died.

6- Read this sentence from the passage:

What songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed

when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions,

are not beyond all conjecture.

The quote means that although these are puzzling questions, (the songs the syrens sang and the name Achilles used), there is an answer.

7- Dupin is the prototype for all detectives; especially Sherlock Holmes.

8- Poe died in 1849, and in 1887, almost 40 years later the first Sherlock Holmes story was published.

9- Dupin is very analytical. He is also quite arrogant. He says that he is so good that most people like looking through an open window into their souls.

10- Poe includes the discussion of Chantilly, the cobbler to give an example of analytical deduction that uses the characters but is not related to the events of the story.

11- Because it uses the characters, we are able to see Dupin in action.

12- Dupin and the narrator read about the murders in the newspapers.

13- The door is locked from the inside, with the key in the lock. There is a bloody razor on the chair. There are large clumps of grey hair pulled out by the roots. There was a lot of soot by the chimney which forced the police to search the chimney where they found the daughter, shoved so tightly up that it took 4-5 men to pull her down. The money was still in the room. The mother was in the yard with her throat severely cut.

14- On a sheet of computer paper, draw the scene of the murder on one side and the outside of the house when the gendarme and neighbors arrive on the other.