In the Library
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe, 1841
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 60 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 14k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Truth is not always in a well.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
Collins does the same thing, but over a whole novel: a baffling theft, a famous detective, and a solution that comes from patient reasoning about what ordinary people overlooked.
£1.99
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle does the same thing, but his Holmes is Dupin grown famous: a brilliant private reasoner working from small clues, here on a foggy moor instead of a Paris street.
£1.99
About the book
Up four flights in the rue Morgue, behind a door fastened from within, two women lie dead, and the neighbours who broke in heard a shrill voice that none of them can place: the Frenchman says Italian, the Englishman German, the Spaniard English, the Italian Russian. Bags of gold sit untouched on the floor. Into this impossible room walks C. Auguste Dupin, a ruined young aristocrat who closes his shutters against the daylight and walks Paris only after dark. Poe invented him here, and with him the detective story itself, the locked room and the baffled police and the loyal friend telling it all, so that every Holmes and every Poirot is his grandchild. The thrill is watching that mind work. Dupin unpicks the crime from a broken nail and a window the police swore was sealed, while you race along and fall behind, until the answer arrives stranger than anything you dared to guess, and horribly, perfectly right.