The Murders of the Rue Morgue

Charles Gemora plays the ape in the 1932 film

What a weird little tale, so entirely dependent upon the exotic, orientalism of an Orang Utan from Borneo; an animal that could not have been well-known in 1841 from a place that most readers would have known almost nothing about (if they knew anything at all).  I was about half way through reading the tale when I remembered that I read it once before, years and years ago, probably when I was a teenager.

It seems so quaintly old-fashioned despite its graphic, Gothic imagery of violence.  When it was published though, it must have been read as shockingly modern.  Did Poe invent the private detective with his character Dupin?  He pre-dates Sherlock Holmes by nearly fifty years and must surely have been part of Conan Doyle's thinking as he constructed the acutely perceptive, supremely analytical Holmes.