The Murders in the Rue Morgue (for Advanced Levels C1-C2)

The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a landmark mystery story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1841. The story is widely regarded as an important early work of detective fiction and introduced readers to C. Auguste Dupin, an intelligent and highly analytical character whose method of solving crimes is based on close observation, logical reasoning, and careful deduction. The story’s unusual combination of mystery, suspense, and intellectual investigation has made it an enduring classic.

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, and literary critic whose works are particularly associated with mystery, horror, and psychological fiction. He was known for creating dark and suspenseful stories in which seemingly ordinary details often have a deeper significance. His distinctive approach to storytelling, especially his interest in crime, investigation, and the workings of the human mind, influenced the development of detective literature.

Set in Paris in the 1840s, the story follows the narrator and his remarkable friend Dupin as they become interested in a shocking double murder. An elderly woman and her daughter are found brutally killed inside a room that appears to have been securely locked from the inside. The circumstances seem impossible: the windows are closed, the door is locked, and no obvious escape route can be found. Several witnesses have also heard two voices, but their descriptions of the second voice are completely different.

While the police struggle to make sense of the evidence, Dupin approaches the case from a different perspective. Instead of accepting the apparent facts at face value, he examines small details, questions common assumptions, and reconstructs the events through logical inference. His investigation gradually reveals how the murderer entered and escaped and leads to a highly unexpected explanation of the crime.

This C1-level English learner edition has been carefully rewritten to make Poe’s classic story more accessible while preserving its central plot, important clues, atmosphere, and intellectual challenge. The language has been adapted for advanced learners, with a focus on natural expressions, sophisticated but practical vocabulary, varied sentence structures, and clear narrative flow. The story has also been divided into eight chapters to make the investigation easier to follow and study.

For English learners, this edition offers more than an entertaining mystery. It provides valuable exposure to advanced vocabulary, collocations, descriptive language, dialogue, logical argument, and narrative structures. Readers can develop their reading comprehension while learning useful words and expressions related to crime, investigation, evidence, reasoning, observation, and human behavior. By following Dupin’s step-by-step deductions, learners can also encounter English in a meaningful context rather than studying vocabulary and grammar in isolation.

Whether you are interested in classic literature, detective fiction, or advanced English, The Murders in the Rue Morgue offers an engaging way to strengthen your English while exploring one of the most intriguing mysteries in literary history.

This story has been carefully adapted and rewritten by LearnEnglish-new.com for advanced English learners. The original work, The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, is in the public domain. This learner-friendly adaptation uses clear, modern English while preserving the main characters, events, mystery, suspense, and themes of the original story. It is designed to help C1–C2 learners develop their reading comprehension, vocabulary, and understanding of literary English. Enjoy reading and improve your English skills!

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

By Edgar Allan Poe

Contents

Chapter One: Auguste Dupin and the Power of Deduction

Chapter Two: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Chapter Three: The Mystery of the Locked Room

Chapter Four: Dupin Investigates the Crime Scene

Chapter Five: The Impossible Escape

Chapter Six: The Strange Evidence

Chapter Seven: The Sailor and the Orangutan

Chapter Eight: The Truth Revealed

Vocabulary

Comprehension Questions

Grammar Exercises

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Chapter One

Auguste Dupin and the Power of Deduction

Paris, in the summer of 1840, was where I first met C. Auguste Dupin.

Dupin came from a distinguished family that had once possessed both wealth and influence. By the time I met him, however, little remained of that fortune. He lived simply and had no particular interest in restoring the family’s former position. Money, he believed, was useful only insofar as it allowed a person to live comfortably and pursue what truly interested him.

For Dupin, that meant books.

We first encountered each other in an old bookshop. By an extraordinary coincidence, we were both looking for the same rare volume. The book was obscure enough that few people had even heard of it. Our shared interest gave us an immediate reason to speak.

We met again in another bookshop, and then again in another. Before long, we had become friends.

I was fascinated by Dupin. His knowledge was remarkably broad, but what impressed me even more was the unusual power of his mind. He did not merely remember facts. He seemed capable of connecting apparently unrelated details and drawing conclusions that other people would never have considered.

I eventually invited him to live with me.

Our life together was quiet. We spent long hours reading, discussing ideas, and examining subjects that most people would have considered unimportant. Dupin especially enjoyed walking through Paris at night. The darkness seemed to sharpen his senses rather than weaken them.

During our walks, I gradually discovered the extraordinary nature of his reasoning ability.

Dupin once told me that most people carried what he called “windows” over their hearts. Through those windows, he claimed, an attentive observer could perceive a person’s thoughts and character.

At first, I regarded this as a philosophical metaphor.

Then he demonstrated what he meant.

One evening, we were walking through a narrow Parisian street. We had been silent for several minutes. Suddenly, Dupin spoke.

“You are right,” he said. “Chantilly is certainly a very small man, and he would probably be more successful in lighter theatrical roles.”

I stopped.

I had not said a word about Chantilly.

“How did you know what I was thinking?” I asked.

Dupin smiled.

“You were thinking about the actor Chantilly and his height.”

I demanded an explanation.

His answer was surprisingly ordinary.

A fruit seller had accidentally collided with me a few minutes earlier. I had stepped awkwardly on some uneven stones and had looked down in irritation. We then passed a section of the street where workers were laying stones according to a new method. Dupin had noticed my reaction and followed the chain of associations in my mind.

From the stones, he reasoned, I had probably thought of stereotomy, a word we had recently encountered in a newspaper.

From stereotomy, he connected my thoughts to Epicurus and his theory of atoms.

From Epicurus, he expected me to think about the heavens and look upward.

When I did so, he saw the constellation Orion.

That reminded him of a newspaper article about Chantilly in which the writer had used language connected with Orion and a book we had previously discussed.

Finally, he noticed that I had straightened my posture.

That, he concluded, indicated that I was thinking about Chantilly’s height.

Every step had followed naturally from the one before it.

Dupin had not read my mind.

He had read my behavior.

That distinction became extremely important to me.

His method was based not on magic, intuition, or supernatural knowledge, but on careful observation followed by logical inference.

I soon realized that Dupin found this kind of reasoning deeply satisfying.

But I had no idea how important that ability would become.

One morning, we read in the newspaper about a terrible crime.

Two women had been murdered in a house on the Rue Morgue.

The police had found almost no explanation.

Dupin, however, immediately became interested.

For him, the case was not simply a horrifying crime.

It was a problem. And Dupin loved problems.

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Chapter Two

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The victims were Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter. They lived alone on the fourth floor of an old house in the Rue Morgue, a street in Paris.

The first reports in the newspaper were confusing and horrifying.

During the night, neighbors had heard terrible screams coming from the house. Several people rushed toward the building and forced their way inside.

As they climbed the stairs, they heard two voices.

One voice was relatively low and seemed to belong to a Frenchman.

The other was loud, harsh, and strangely difficult to identify.

When the people reached the fourth floor, they found a locked room.

The door was locked from the inside.

They broke it open.

What they discovered inside was almost impossible to explain.

The room was in complete disorder. Furniture had been overturned, clothes had been scattered across the floor, and blood was visible in several places.

A bloody knife lay on the floor.

Near the fireplace, investigators found pieces of gray hair.

The daughter’s body had been forced into the narrow opening above the fireplace. Her neck showed deep marks that appeared to have been made by powerful fingers.

The mother was discovered outside the building, behind the house.

Her throat had been almost completely cut.

There seemed to be no rational explanation for what had happened.

The investigators searched the entire building.

No murderer was found.

The windows of the room were closed and locked from the inside. The door had also been locked from within. The opening above the fireplace was too narrow for an ordinary person to escape through.

The newspapers reported every detail they could collect.

Witnesses were questioned.

One witness said the strange voice sounded Spanish.

Another thought it might have been English.

An Englishman believed it was Italian.

An Italian witness thought both voices sounded French.

The witnesses could agree on almost nothing except one detail:

The voice was strange.

Nobody could understand what it was saying.

The police also discovered that the women had not been robbed.

A large quantity of gold had recently been withdrawn from a bank and brought to the house. Yet the money was still there.

This fact created another puzzle.

If the murderer had killed the women for money, why had he left the money behind?

The police had no convincing answer.

When Dupin and I finished reading the newspaper report, I felt that the case was hopeless.

“It is a mystery,” I said.

Dupin looked at me calmly.

“It is certainly a mystery,” he replied. “But that does not mean that it has no solution.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“Because every effect has a cause. The fact that we do not yet understand the cause does not mean that there is none.”

He folded the newspaper.

“We should go to the Rue Morgue.”

“To investigate?”

“To observe.”

There was a difference between those two activities, at least in Dupin’s mind.

The police had already investigated.

Dupin intended to see.

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Chapter Three

The Mystery of the Locked Room

We reached the Rue Morgue later that afternoon.

A crowd had gathered outside the house. People were still fascinated by the crime, and rumors were spreading rapidly throughout Paris.

Before entering, Dupin carefully examined the building from the outside.

He studied the neighboring houses, the walls, the windows, and the space surrounding the building.

I could not understand what he was looking for.

Inside the house, we were allowed to examine the room where the murders had taken place.

The police had disturbed very little.

Dupin inspected everything.

He examined the bodies.

He studied the walls.

He looked at the fireplace.

He examined the windows.

He inspected the furniture and the floor.

He said almost nothing.

On our way home, he remained silent.

The following morning, however, he entered my room with an expression of intense concentration.

“There are several things about the case that trouble me,” he said.

“The strength of the murderer is one of them. The nature of the voices is another. Then there is the condition of the room, the position of the daughter’s body, and the extraordinary violence used against the older woman.”

He paused.

“Most importantly, there is the question of escape.”

“The murderer could not have escaped through the door,” I said. “It was locked from the inside.”

“Correct.”

“Nor through the fireplace.”

“Correct again.”

“And both windows were locked.”

“Yes.”

“Then how could anyone have escaped?”

Dupin smiled slightly.

“That is exactly the question we must answer.”

He explained that the police had approached the case from the wrong direction.

They had concentrated on what appeared impossible.

Dupin wanted to determine whether the impossible was merely something that had not yet been properly understood.

“The police,” he said, “often examine a problem too closely. They see individual details, but they fail to understand how those details fit together.”

He returned to the question of the voices.

“That evidence is more important than you realize.”

“The witnesses all agreed that one voice was French.”

“Yes.”

“But they disagreed completely about the other.”

“Exactly.”

Dupin leaned forward.

“A Spaniard heard one thing. An Englishman heard another. An Italian heard something else. Yet none of them could identify a single understandable word.”

“What does that suggest?”

“It suggests that the second voice was not simply a foreign human voice.”

I stared at him.

“What else could it be?”

“That,” he replied, “is what we must discover.”

He then turned his attention to the physical evidence.

The force required to kill the daughter was extraordinary.

The force required to tear the mother’s hair from her head was equally extraordinary.

The violence seemed excessive even for a brutal human murderer.

And there was another detail.

The hair found near the fireplace did not look entirely human.

Dupin had collected a sample.

He had also carefully examined the marks around the daughter’s neck.

The police believed that the marks had been made by human fingers.

Dupin was not convinced.

The more he considered the evidence, the more certain he became that the solution lay in the details that everyone else had dismissed.

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Chapter Four

Dupin Investigates the Crime Scene

Dupin began with the most obvious question:

How had the murderer entered and left the room?

There were only a few possibilities. The murderer could have used the door. He could have escaped through the fireplace. Or he could have used one of the windows.

The first two possibilities were easily eliminated. The door had been broken open by the witnesses.

The fireplace opening was too narrow. That left the windows. At first, this seemed impossible too.

Both windows appeared to be firmly secured. However, Dupin had noticed something unusual.

One of the windows had a nail that appeared to prevent it from opening. He removed the nail and tried to raise the window. It still would not move.

This suggested that the nail was not actually responsible for keeping the window shut.

Dupin searched more carefully.

Eventually, he discovered a hidden mechanism.

A small spring-controlled catch had been overlooked.

When Dupin pressed it, the window opened easily.

He then understood something important.

The window could be closed from outside.

Once closed, the mechanism would automatically lock it.

But what about the nail?

Dupin replaced it.

The window once again appeared impossible to open.

He now understood how the police had been deceived.

The nail created the appearance of a locked window, while the hidden mechanism created the actual security.

The murderer could have left through the window and allowed it to lock itself.

But there was still another problem.

The window was on the fourth floor.

How could a human being have reached it?

Dupin had already considered that question.

When we first visited the house, he had carefully examined the outside wall.

There he had noticed a long metal lightning rod extending from the roof toward the ground.

An unusually agile and powerful person might have climbed it.

But even an experienced climber would have struggled to reach the window.

Dupin therefore considered another possibility.

Perhaps the murderer was not an ordinary human being.

This idea explained several otherwise inexplicable details.

The incredible strength.

The strange voice.

The unusual method of entering the room.

The violence.

The physical evidence.

The apparently impossible escape.

One mystery seemed to be solving another.

But Dupin still needed proof.

A theory was not enough.

He needed evidence strong enough to survive examination.

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Chapter Five

The Impossible Escape

Dupin returned to the second window. This window had been partly hidden by the bed.

The police had examined it, but they had not studied it with the same attention Dupin had given it.

He moved the bed aside. There was another nail. At first glance, it looked exactly like the one on the first window. But Dupin noticed a subtle difference.

He pressed the hidden catch. The window opened.

As it moved upward, part of the nail came with it.

The nail had been broken.

Its head remained in position, creating the appearance of an intact fastening.

Dupin carefully examined it.

The broken nail explained the mystery.

The murderer could have opened the window from inside, escaped through it, and allowed it to close behind him.

From inside the room, the broken nail looked as if it were still holding the window shut.

To anyone examining the scene afterward, the window appeared impossible to use as an escape route.

But appearances were deceptive.

The murderer had escaped through it.

The next question was even more difficult.

How had he reached the ground?

Dupin took me outside and pointed toward the lightning rod.

“A person of extraordinary strength and agility could climb this,” he explained.

“But the murderer would have had to move quickly.”

“Exactly.”

He then pointed toward the window.

The distance between the lightning rod and the window was significant.

An ordinary man would probably not have been able to make the leap.

But Dupin was no longer imagining an ordinary man.

He was imagining something with exceptional physical ability.

Something capable of climbing almost vertically.

Something strong enough to overpower an adult woman.

Something capable of tearing out large amounts of hair.

Something with hands powerful enough to leave enormous marks around a human neck.

The clues were beginning to converge.

The murderer’s strength was not merely greater than that of an ordinary man.

It seemed almost beyond human limits.

Dupin then reconsidered the room itself.

The furniture had been violently overturned.

The daughter’s body had been forced into the fireplace opening.

The mother’s head had nearly been severed.

The hair near the fireplace had been torn out with extraordinary force.

None of this suggested a carefully planned human crime.

There was no clear motive.

There was no attempt to steal the money.

There was no rational pattern.

The violence seemed wild rather than purposeful.

And then there was the voice.

A voice without recognizable words.

Dupin had reached a disturbing conclusion.

The killer might not be human.

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Chapter Six

The Strange Evidence

Dupin placed the hair sample on the table.

“Look carefully,” he said.

I examined it.

“It does not look like ordinary human hair.”

“No.”

He then showed me the marks that had been found around the daughter’s neck.

The doctors had believed that they were made by human fingers.

Dupin disagreed.

He asked me to place my fingers over the marks.

I tried.

My hand could not reproduce the shape.

The marks were too large.

The grip had been far too powerful.

Dupin then gave me a small piece of wood approximately the size of a human neck.

He asked me to repeat the experiment.

Again, my hand could not match the marks.

“Those were not made by a human hand,” he said.

A cold sensation passed through me.

“What made them, then?”

Dupin pointed toward the hair.

“Consider all the evidence together.”

He explained that the murderer possessed tremendous strength but displayed very little human judgment.

The violence was uncontrolled.

The voice was not understandable.

The physical evidence did not correspond to an ordinary human being.

The marks on the daughter’s neck were enormous.

The hair was unusual.

The murderer had climbed the outside of a fourth-floor building.

All these clues pointed in the same direction.

Dupin consulted a scientific book containing descriptions and illustrations of animals.

Then he pointed to an orangutan.

I immediately understood what he was suggesting.

An orangutan possessed extraordinary strength.

Its hands were much larger and more powerful than those of a human being.

Its physical abilities could explain the climb.

Its wild behavior could explain the violence.

Its inability to speak human language could explain the strange voice.

Suddenly, the seemingly unrelated clues formed a coherent picture.

But one problem remained.

There had been two voices.

If the orangutan had been responsible for the murders, who had produced the second voice?

Dupin returned to the newspaper reports.

The lower voice had said only two understandable words:

“My God!”

Those words had been spoken in French.

Dupin concluded that a French-speaking man had been present.

He might have followed the animal to the house.

Perhaps the animal had escaped from him.

Perhaps he had been trying to recover it.

Whatever the exact circumstances, Dupin believed that the man knew what had happened.

He therefore placed a notice in the newspaper announcing that an orangutan had been captured.

The notice stated that its owner could reclaim it.

Dupin was confident that the owner would come.

“Why would he risk coming?” I asked.

“Because the animal is valuable,” Dupin replied. “And because he will want to recover it before anyone discovers the truth.”

We waited.

After some time, we heard footsteps on the stairs.

Someone stopped outside.

Then the footsteps continued.

The door opened.

A large sailor entered.

Dupin smiled.

The final piece of the puzzle had arrived.

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Chapter Seven

The Sailor and the Orangutan

The man was strong and heavily built. He carried a large piece of wood, which suggested that he was prepared to defend himself if necessary.

Dupin greeted him calmly.

“You have come about the orangutan?”

The sailor nodded.

He admitted that the animal belonged to him.

Dupin asked several apparently casual questions.

How old was the animal?

Where had it come from?

How valuable was it?

The sailor answered cautiously.

Dupin then offered to return the animal to him.

“But,” he added, “I would like something in exchange.”

The sailor looked at him suspiciously.

“What?”

“Tell me everything you know about the murders in the Rue Morgue.”

The sailor immediately became pale.

Dupin quietly locked the door.

Then he placed a pistol on the table.

The sailor’s fear became obvious.

Dupin assured him that he was not being accused of murder.

“I know you did not kill the women,” he said. “But I also know that you know who—or rather what—did.”

The sailor remained silent.

Finally, he agreed to tell the truth.

His story explained the entire mystery.

About a year earlier, his ship had sailed to Borneo.

There, deep in the jungle, he and another sailor had encountered an orangutan.

The animal was powerful, difficult to control, and extremely valuable.

They managed to capture it and bring it aboard the ship.

Later, the sailor’s companion died, leaving him responsible for the animal.

Eventually, he brought the orangutan back to Paris.

He kept it hidden because he intended to sell it.

But the animal was difficult to control.

One night, when the sailor returned home, he discovered that the orangutan had escaped.

The animal was holding a razor or knife in its hand.

The sailor was terrified.

When the animal saw him, it ran from the room and escaped into the street.

The sailor followed it.

The animal seemed to enjoy the chase.

It repeatedly stopped, looked back at him, and then ran away again.

Eventually, they reached the Rue Morgue.

The orangutan noticed a light shining from a fourth-floor window.

It also saw the lightning rod.

With remarkable speed, it climbed the rod and entered the room.

The sailor followed, but he could not make the final leap to the window.

He therefore watched from outside.

Inside the room were the two women.

They had no idea that the animal was there.

The older woman suddenly saw it.

She screamed.

The animal reacted violently.

It grabbed her by the hair and moved the knife in front of her face.

The daughter collapsed in terror.

The older woman continued screaming.

The orangutan became increasingly frightened and agitated.

It pulled violently at the woman’s hair, tearing out a large amount.

Then, in a single movement, it nearly severed her head.

The daughter began to move.

The animal turned toward her.

It seized her by the neck and squeezed with tremendous force.

Within moments, she was dead.

The animal then became even more confused.

Seeing the sailor outside the window, it ran wildly around the room.

It overturned furniture and destroyed the room.

Then it grabbed the daughter’s body and pushed it into the fireplace opening.

Finally, it threw the older woman’s body out of the window.

The sailor, horrified, escaped down the lightning rod.

He ran away without looking back.

He had never intended to participate in the murders.

He had simply been unable to control the animal.

Now Dupin understood everything.

The locked room.

The broken nail.

The lightning rod.

The strange voice.

The enormous strength.

The hair.

The fingerprints.

The money that had not been stolen.

The second voice.

Every clue had found its place.

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Chapter Eight

The Truth Revealed

The mystery of the Rue Morgue had seemed impossible because the evidence had been interpreted incorrectly.

The police had assumed that a human murderer was responsible.

Once that assumption was removed, the evidence became much easier to understand.

The locked room was not truly impossible.

The murderer had entered through an open window and escaped through the same route.

The window had closed and locked itself.

The broken nail had created the illusion that it had never been opened.

The extraordinary strength of the murderer had seemed almost supernatural.

In reality, it belonged to an orangutan.

The strange voice had seemed foreign because it was not the voice of a foreign human at all.

It was the sound of an animal.

The second voice belonged to the sailor, who had cried out in horror when he witnessed the violence.

The money had been left behind because robbery had never been the motive.

The chaos in the room had not been the result of a carefully planned crime.

It had been the result of an animal acting in terror and confusion.

Dupin had solved the case not because he possessed supernatural powers, but because he refused to accept the obvious explanation.

He questioned every assumption.

He paid attention to details that others ignored.

He compared different pieces of evidence.

Most importantly, he asked not only what had happened, but what kind of event could produce all the observed facts at the same time.

The police had seen contradictions.

Dupin saw connections.

The police had focused on the locked door.

Dupin focused on the possibility of another exit.

The police had assumed that the voices belonged to human beings.

Dupin asked why none of the witnesses could identify the strange voice.

The police had assumed that money was the motive.

Dupin noticed that the money had been left untouched.

The police had assumed that the marks on the daughter’s neck were human fingerprints.

Dupin compared them with the physical evidence and recognized that they were too large.

In each case, Dupin questioned an assumption that appeared reasonable.

That was the real source of his success.

The mystery had not been solved by luck.

It had been solved through observation, inference, and the careful elimination of impossible explanations.

The police chief was not particularly pleased that an amateur had solved a case that had defeated the police.

Dupin, however, seemed unconcerned.

For him, the important thing was not recognition.

It was the intellectual satisfaction of solving a difficult problem.

The case of the Rue Morgue demonstrated something that Dupin had understood from the beginning:

What appears impossible is not necessarily impossible.

Sometimes it is simply misunderstood.

And sometimes the smallest detail—the position of a nail, a strange strand of hair, a sound that nobody can identify—contains the key to the entire mystery.

The truth is often hidden in plain sight.

The real challenge is learning how to see it.

— THE END —

Read the original story: americanliterature.com

Vocabulary

Comprehension Questions

Grammar Exercises

Answer Key

1-A, 2-B, 3-C, 4-B, 5-C, 6-B, 7-A, 8-A, 9-B, 10-B, 11-B, 12-A, 13-B, 14-B, 15-C, 16-B, 17-A, 18-A, 19-A, 20-B

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