Murder Mystery Summary

Read this - especially if your name is Zufar and you bunked off this morning:

As in any good detective story, the actual police are stupid compared to the detective hero, so naturally in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the police couldn’t possibly solve such a mysterious case. Our hero Dupin, however, was able to do so very quickly. He applied logic to the situation, and was able to unravel the mystery.

Dupin realised that the witness accounts of the voices heard from the fourth storey were conflicting. Each witness claimed one of the voices to have been a different language, yet none of them spoke the language that they claimed it to be. After stating that there were not many Asian or African people in Paris, Dupin’s conclusion was therefore that it might not have been a language at all.

The police thought that because all the windows appeared to have been nailed shut, the murderer could not have used them to enter the building. However, Dupin inspected these nails and discovered that not all of them were solid. He was able to open the windows in spite of these nails, because they used a different mechanism for opening and closing. This was what had allowed the murderer to enter and exit the building, apparently without a trace.

Concerning motive, Dupin concluded that the murderer had not killed the ladies in order to steal from them. According to Dupin, if the murderer had been a thief, he wouldn’t have left four thousand francs in gold and numerous valuable pieces of jewellery in the house. Dupin’s friend thought that the murderer must therefore have been a madman – he might even have escaped from a nearby mental hospital. However, Dupin doubted this because the brutality of the murders meant that the killer must have had superhuman strength. The murderer had been strong enough to pull out a handful of human hair by the root, to almost slice off a woman’s head with a razor before throwing her out of a window, and he had even managed to push a corpse up a chimney upside down. Dupin’s conclusion, then, was that the murderer could not have been a man at all.

Finally, Dupin found a new piece of evidence. In Madame L’Espanaye’s hand there were some orange hairs. After inspecting this hair carefully, he was able to identify it as the hair of an Ourang Utang!

Now make some guesses and suggestions with the following prompts:

Likelihood

Where did the Ourang Utang come from?

It can’t have…

It might have…

It must have…


Obligation

What should Dupin do next…

He should…

He shouldn’t…

He has to…


What should happen to the sailor?

He should…


in hindsight…


The police shouldn’t have…

The police should have…

The sailor should have…

The sailor shouldn’t have…

Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter should have…

Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter shouldn’t have…


Regrets

The sailor probably regrets…

The chief of police must regret…