In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the police assume that the murders have been committed by some persons associated with the victim. Dupin discards this unproven assumption and embarks on finding a different solution. Dupin concludes, after questioning all the witnesses, that the murder could not have been committed by the prime suspect, or by any human. After getting the idea from a newspaper story about an escaped orangutan, Dupin makes the imaginative connection that an orangutan may have committed the heinous deed. Kenneth Silverman writes that Poe picked the solution from several articles in American newspapers written in the 1840s that featured stories “concerning razor-wielding apes” (172). Poe’s solution also played to the public’s fears about the many unexpected dangers lurking in the streets of Paris. Mabbott notes that Walter Scott’s, “Count Robert of Paris.” involved murdering orangutans, and that, “Orangs were popular in America, having been occasionally exhibited since 1831.” In identifying an ape as a murderer, Poe also enters the popular nineteenth-century discussion of evolution. The ape can also be seen as a metaphor about the barbaric and primitive tendencies of humanity. Perhaps Poe imagined that, if the evolutionary process could connect men and apes, then apes might have the same tendencies to commit murders of humans. Dupin demonstrated in his first case that he could unravel almost any mystery. In my Poe and Science column, I will explore one spectacular attempt that Poe made to simultaneously solve a real and fictional crime.
“The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842-43) was inspired by a popular story that Poe ripped from the headlines about a once well-known cigar girl named Mary Rogers who was actually found dead in the Hudson River of New York. Eric Stashower writes “The drama of Mary Rogers would be one of the earliest and most significant murder cases to play out in the pages of the American press, laying the groundwork for every crime of the century to follow…Citizens and politicians called for a solution to the case for the streets to be made safe” (5). Poe informed his editor that he was planning to take up the case in a manner that had never been attempted. He proposed to study the actual official newspaper and police reports of the Mary Rogers case, to report on the strengths and weaknesses of the formal police investigations, and then eventually to offer his own real-life solutions to the case. Stashower suggests, “Poe’s original goals were to put pressure on the police to re-open the case” (6). Ultimately, the story was published by Snowden’s Ladies Companion of New York in three serialized versions running from 1842-43 (719). As the Mary Rogers case remained unsolved after more than a year, Poe decided to develop a fictional case, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which would run parallel to the actual reporting of Mary Rogers’s case. Poe was attempting to demonstrate that Dupin’s methods could untangle a real-life unsolved murder case. This assertion was a tremendous gamble. As Poe’s career as a student at the University of Virginia demonstrated, he was willing to gamble his reputation and his future on a speculative hunch. Any writer of fiction can design a case and know, even at the onset, who committed the crime and how the investigator will solve the crime. However, by stating that he could derive the motive, construct the solution, and name the actual murderer of an actual crime, Poe hoped that he could elevate his status from a literary writer to that of a serious non-professional science investigator.
As the Roget story developed, it started to mirror many of the reported details of the Rogers case. Poe, first writing through the voice of an editor/narrator, associates his story with the notorious newspaper case. “The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public, will be found to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS, at New York.” The narrator observes the sensational headline and reflects: “Hearing what I have lately heard, it would be indeed strange should I remain silent in regard to what I both heard and saw so long ago” (Stashower 724). At this point, the editor-narrator states he believes that Dupin, who had been successful in solving the “Rue Morgue” case might be interested in trying to solve the “Rogers” murders. Poe changes the victim’s name to “Roget,” moves the crime scene to Paris, and narrates a version of the story involving his ace detective Dupin. In Poe’s first serialized version of the story, a female body was discovered in the Seine River about three days after she left her home. Investigator Dupin rules out a number of other suspicions reported in the newspaper, including a theory that Roget had been killed by gangs. Urban gangs were widespread and were a great public concern in France in the 1830s. Stashower notes that the New York Post first reported that gang leader, James Gordon Bennett, was arrested and suspected by the police of the assault and murder of Mary Rogers. Articles of Mary Rogers’ clothing near the suspected murder scene seemed to confirm that she had struggled and had been assaulted by thugs (28). In “Marie Roget,” Dupin notes that the Paris newspaper, Le Commercial reported, but was somewhat skeptical of the popular view that: “Marie had been the victim of a gang of desperadoes—that by these she had borne across the river, maltreated, and murdered” (734). Dupin also disputes that theory. He writes that it is impossible to consider the idea that the beautiful and famous Marie Roget, being pursued and assaulted by gang members, would have been able to walk three blocks on the Paris streets in the daytime and be unnoticed by eye-witnesses. Dupin suggests that the newspapers reported two known facts which, he concludes, are not connected, i.e., that the body of Marie Roget was pulled from the river, and that gangs were known to assail defenseless victims in Paris along the river.
Dupin’s next questions the police officials’ hastily derived assumptions about the time of death. These details were based upon reports which were printed in the Paris newspapers. The police account stated: “All experience has shown that drowned bodies or bodies were thrown in the water immediately after death by violence require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to bring them to the top of the water.” The implication of the police report was that the body recovered from the river after three days was not Roget’s. Dupin disputes the police’s conclusions and supports his own claims with several pages of detailed scientific discussions. His report explains that water displacement of a deceased body equalizes with the pressure of water at about three days. Therefore, he concluded, contrary to the police, that a dead body would have about the same weight as water in three days, or about the time that Roget’s body was found. (740). Dupin’s ability to introduce a scientific basis behind his theory adds to the verisimilitude of his narrative. In addition, his application of forensic evidence to settle a central disputed fact in his case established a precedent that has been followed by many detective writers up to the present day.
Selected Works Cited:
Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. New York: Dutton, 2006.
by 
