The Murders in the Rue Morgue

When I was reading about the various Dickens books out there to see the sort of thing available, I came across some article talking about Bleak House as an early example of detective fiction. After finishing Sherlock Holmes and a few other more modern crime fiction books, I thought I would likely enjoy Dicken’s style which I already appreciate turned to this genre. However, I got there and found it to be such a mighty tome that I can hardly lift the thing. I googled this claim of early detective work, and found one other book in the running (which by the bye was published a decade or so before Bleak House): The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe. I new Poe mainly from The Raven. More specifically, from the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror version of The Raven. But, since I was in for gothic detectiving, and it’s a mercifully short book, I picked it up.

The narrator of the book lives in Paris with a roommate, who turns up to be a proto-Sherlock-Holmes figure with a knack for deduction. There comes a newspaper account of a particularly gruesome murder. This is not something you see a lot in Conan Doyle’s work but there is a deduction that’s just on the outskirts of believable, that explains the thing. I might have preferred some foreshadowing of the solve - sometimes the detective reveals information known in the world, but maybe not known to the reader, which feels a little bit like cheating.

I enjoyed the book, and it’s depiction of the detective from the point of view of his roommate - very Holmesian - and I can see all the pieces for what would become detective fiction in there. A very good - and did I say quick? - read.