The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Fort Raphael Publishing Company Edition) recap

In Paris, the unnamed narrator befriends the impoverished but brilliant C. Auguste Dupin. When Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter Camille are brutally killed inside an apparently locked room on the Rue Morgue, witnesses agree that they heard a French voice and a second voice that none can identify. The police arrest bank clerk Adolphe Le Bon, but Dupin finds that the untouched gold, a damaged window fastening, unusual hair, immense strength, and marks on Camille's throat point away from a human murderer. He advertises for the owner of a lost orangutan and draws out a sailor, who admits that his escaped animal entered the women's room carrying a razor. Imitating shaving, the ape killed both women and then tried to conceal them when frightened by its pursuing owner. The animal is recovered, Le Bon is freed, and Dupin solves the locked-room mystery by treating the witnesses' incompatible impressions as evidence rather than error.

The narrator opens with reflections on analytical reasoning, then recalls meeting C. Auguste Dupin in Paris. The two become companions and live in deliberate seclusion, where Dupin displays an ability to reconstruct another person's thoughts from small observations. Their attention turns to reports of a horrifying crime on the Rue Morgue. Madame L'Espanaye is found outside the house with her throat cut, while her daughter Camille has been strangled and wedged into a chimney. The room was locked from within and violently disordered, yet a large sum of gold remains. Neighbors heard one French voice and another harsh voice, but witnesses from several nations each assign the second speaker a different foreign language while admitting they understood no words. Police arrest bank clerk Adolphe Le Bon, the last person known to have visited with the women's gold. Dupin inspects the house and concludes that an apparently fixed window could have closed itself after the intruder escaped. The killer's strength, agility, hair, voice, and hand span indicate an orangutan rather than a person. A sailor answers Dupin's notice about the animal and explains that it escaped carrying his razor, killed the women while imitating shaving, and tried to hide the bodies when alarmed by his pursuit. The animal is later recovered, Le Bon is released, and Dupin's reconstruction resolves the locked-room case.

Dupin places a newspaper notice claiming that a lost orangutan has been found, correctly expecting its owner to respond. A sailor arrives and, after Dupin assures him that the animal is known to be responsible, explains what happened. The orangutan escaped with a razor after watching the sailor shave, reached the L'Espanaye apartment, and tried to imitate shaving on Madame L'Espanaye. Her resistance enraged it; it cut her throat and strangled Camille. When the sailor shouted from outside, the frightened animal attempted to hide what it had done, forcing Camille into the chimney and throwing her mother's body through the window. The sailor fled rather than report the truth. The orangutan is later captured and sold, and Adolphe Le Bon is released. The police prefect resents Dupin's intervention, but the case demonstrates that patient attention to apparently impossible evidence can succeed where exhaustive yet conventional police work fails.