Many later characters, for example, follow Poe's model of the brilliant detective, his personal friend who serves as narrator, and the final revelation being presented before the reasoning that leads up to it.

The unnamed narrator opens with a lengthy commentary on the nature and practice of analytical reasoning, then describes the circumstances under which he first met Dupin during a visit to Paris.

Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter Camille have been found dead at their home in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris.

The mother was found in a yard behind the house, with multiple broken bones and her throat so deeply cut that her head fell off when the body was moved.

Camille was found strangled to death and stuffed upside down into a chimney, wedged so tightly that it took the strength of several men to pull her loose.

A bank clerk named Adolphe Le Bon, who had delivered the gold coins to the ladies the day before, is arrested even though there is no other evidence linking him to the crime.

He and the narrator examine the house thoroughly; Dupin dismisses the idea of Le Bon's guilt and a robbery motive, citing the fact that the gold was not taken.

He formulates a method by which the murderer could have entered the room and killed both women, involving an agile climb up a lightning rod and a leap to a set of open window shutters.

The sailor explains that he captured the orangutan while in Borneo and brought it back to Paris, intending to sell it, but had trouble keeping it under control.

When he saw the orangutan attempting to shave its face with his straight razor, imitating his morning grooming, it fled into the streets and reached the Rue Morgue, where it climbed up and into the house.

The sailor sells the orangutan, Le Bon is released from custody, and an embarrassed G– sarcastically remarks that people should mind their own business.

[6] Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" at a time when crime was at the forefront in people's minds due to urban development.

[9][10] Poe defines Dupin's method, ratiocination, using the example of a card player: "the extent of information obtained; lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation".

[16] Poe biographer Jeffrey Meyers sums up the significance of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by saying it "changed the history of world literature".

[17] Poe's role in the creation of the detective story is reflected in the Edgar Awards, given annually by the Mystery Writers of America.

[18] "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" also established many tropes that would become common elements in mystery fiction: the eccentric but brilliant detective, the bumbling constabulary, the first-person narration by a close personal friend.

[9] The Pennsylvania Inquirer printed that "it proves Mr Poe to be a man of genius... with an inventive power and skill, of which we know no parallel".

"[3]The word detective did not exist at the time Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue",[9] though there were other stories that featured similar problem-solving characters.

de Scuderi, a kind of 19th-century Miss Marple, establishes the innocence of the police's favorite suspect in the murder of a jeweler, is sometimes cited as the first detective story.

[24] Other forerunners include Voltaire's Zadig (1748), with a main character who performs similar feats of analysis,[1] themselves borrowed from The Three Princes of Serendip, an Italian rendition of Amir Khusro's "Hasht-Bihisht".

[25] Poe may also have been expanding on previous analytical works of his own including the essay on "Maelzel's Chess Player" and the comedic "Three Sundays in a Week".

[39] "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was also reprinted in Wiley & Putnam's collection of Poe's stories simply called Tales.

One was Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery (1908) in which an escaped gorilla attacks and kills a young woman in her home.

In 1914 a film promoted as a three-reel "comedy-drama" titled The Phantom Thief involves a monkey stealing a pearl necklace.

[51] In the 2023 Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher, Auguste Dupin is reimagined as an Assistant United States Attorney.