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Complex situations are often simpler than they appear. 

Dupin believes that most situations that appear to be impossibly complex are, in reality, quite simple. The murders in the Rue Morgue look shockingly complicated. The brutality with which two quiet and unassuming women are murdered seems senseless, which makes the police imagine there must be some deeper motive. There appears to be no way for the murderer to have left the murder scene because of the witnesses coming up the stairs. The shrieking voice whose language no one can pinpoint further adds to the riddle. The mysterious and contradictory nature of all these factors makes the police and the narrator assume the situation to be extremely sinister and multifaceted. This assumption results in the police arresting Le Bon despite there being no clear evidence simply because he helps Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye bring money home from the bank. Reading into this fact, the police assume he must have murdered them for the money and the other bizarre details are part of him being a master criminal genius.

Dupin reveals all this speculation to be overcomplicating matters. Once he assumes the simplest solution, that the windows in the bedroom were not actually as locked as they seem, the other pieces fall into place. The brutality of the murder seems senseless because it was literally committed by a brute, an animal. No one can understand the language of the shrieking figure because it was not a language at all. Dupin succeeds where the police fail because he is not trying to look for the sinister or impossible, but instead he's attempting to unravel the tangle of the murder scene until it makes sense. As he puts it, the police are confused because they focus on the ways the murder is unusual, and therefore assume it must be complex. 

True analysis requires creative thinking.

Dupin thrives in solving this unusual crime because he is not merely logical but also creative. The narrator, upon meeting Dupin, is enamored with how creative Dupin is (“I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and what I could only term the vivid freshness, of his imagination”), a point that can be easily lost in how logical Dupin appears to be. The way Dupin’s creativity is so easily overlooked is perhaps why the narrator spends quite a bit of time explaining the creative aspect of the nature of analysis, how it leads to adaptability, responding to the situation at hand. In the narrator’s explanation of chess, draughts (checkers), and whist, he explains that games that don’t have a set strategy but instead force the player to examine the psychology of their opponent are inherently more analytical because they require imagination. Dupin’s ability to adapt his thinking to the situation at hand is on full display during his playful conversation with the narrator about the theater actor. He traces the narrator’s train of thought not through brute deduction based on impersonal observations or how he thinks all humans behave, but through his understanding of the narrator and the conversations they had recently.

A creative eye on the murders of Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye is essential for solving them because they are both simple and unusual. Logic may allow Dupin to deduce that the window must not be entirely locked through the process of elimination, but only imagination can make him begin to consider an animal as a possible suspect. As outlandish as the orangutan seems as a suspect, it’s clear Dupin does not suggest it on a whim or from pure fancy. He instead looks at all the facts he knows about the murderer. His imagination, working with his logic, allows him to see that if he considers an animal as the murderer, multiple pieces fall into place, and the complex nature of the case suddenly becomes simple and obvious.

 Crime is a kind of puzzle that can be solved.

“Murders in the Rue Morgue” established a new way of imagining crime. While the police and public in the story focus on the emotional horror of the crime, the extreme brutality with which it was committed and apparent senselessness, Dupin, our enlightened detective, focuses only on the evidence, putting the pieces together like a puzzle. It makes sense, therefore, that the narrator spends so much time at the beginning of the story explaining analysis in terms of games like chess, checkers (draughts), and whist. The narrator explains the value of checkers and whist because a good player must analyze the strategy of each individual game differently, responding to what’s before him. Chess, the narrator claims, is more of a series of moves based on time-tested strategies, a test of remembering how to respond to a situation.

While this prologue may seem out of place in a story of such graphic violence, the power of Dupin’s analysis is the way he’s not distracted by the violent particulars of the case and instead looks at the facts. He approaches the murder scene methodically, ruling out all the methods of egress until he’s left with the window as the only possibility. When he lays out the case to the narrator, he lists all the known facts about the murderer—its voice, handprint, and agility—as if laying out the pieces of a logic puzzle or riddle. Dupin contends that the police are unable to solve the murder because they get tripped up on its unusual characteristics. They try to fit any piece of the murder they can into a template of crime more familiar to them, hence their arrest of Le Bon. Because Dupin treats crime as a puzzle, the novelty engages instead of stymies him.

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