The Fantastic Adventures of the Super-Analyst (a Satire)

Episode 1: Mystery in the Rue Morgue

Before we start the narrative, I just thought I’d share this set of random rambling observations that may or may not eventually pertain to the actual story:

The ability to analyze is practically a superpower. While normal men may harness their physical strength, the analyst—who is infinitely more amazing—harnesses the power of the mind. The super-analyst doesn’t play chess, which is for sissies. A defined set of rules and moves is too simple for the analyst, who probably knows which move you’ll make before you do. No, the super-analyst plays whist, because he can see through everything you do and can pretty much read minds. The best chess-player is only good at chess, but being good at whist implies awesomeness in general. Super-analysts should not be mistaken for simple geniuses, by the way. Geniuses can’t use the Powers of Analysis and will never be as awesome as the Super-analysts, who wield not only the Powers of Analysis but also the Power of Imagination.

Now, assuming you haven’t dozed off, let’s continue. I was residing in Paris— (What? Who, me? I’m not quite important enough to have a name; I'm just here to write things down.) —I was residing in Paris when I became acquainted with one M. Dupre, a true gentleman who had unfortunately been reduced to poverty through absolutely no fault of his own. Disillusioned, he took refuge in reading books, and I only made his acquaintance because we happened to both be insanely intelligent and we wanted the same book. The more we talked, the more friendly we became, and when I proposed living together, he agreed at once (though this may have been because he was, as I said, impoverished, and you can’t eat books). We found this fantastically gloomy and grotesque house (read: secret superhero lair) and secluded ourselves there in secret far from any of our former associates. M. Dupre only went out at night; during the day we shuttered the house completely so no one would know of his secret identity.

Yet I was unaware of the truth of M. Dupre until a stroll around town one evening. We were walking in silence when all of a sudden Dupre exclaimed, “He’s rather short.”

“Of course,” I said, and then, when my mind caught up, I exclaimed, “how did you know what I was thinking?”

“I’m a Super-analyst. I know you went from thinking about chess to the fruiterer to the constellations to Chantilly.”

“Amazing! How did you know I began with chess?”

“You’re just the type,” he said. It was then that I realized that he was a Super-analyst, that the mansion was his secret hideout, and that I was his sidekick.

We later read in the newspaper about an interesting murder case: Mme. L’Espoir and Mlle. Camille L’Espoir, who lived all alone in a street appropriately named the Rue Morgue, had roused the entire neighborhood with screams early one morning. Neighbors broke into the house—taking their sweet time to get to the room where the noise actually came from, because otherwise they’d know what had happened and there would be no story—and found the women dead. Their possessions had been scattered about, and there was blood all over, and just for fun Mlle L’Espoir’s body was found upside down in the chimney and Mme L’Espoir’s head came off.

Now, the neighbors who ran to the rescue all had different ideas about what happened. One thought one of the men who murdered the L’Espoirs was a Frenchman, another thought he was Italian, another English, another German, another Russian—and actually, it may have been a woman after all.

Dupre was naturally interested in the case. “The Parisian police,” scoffed he, “are perplexed by the lack of motive. The poor things aren’t even geniuses. They are mere shortsighted mortals—don’t they know that the best way to see a star is not to look at it at all? Come, Narrator. We have nothing better to do than to solve this case.”

And so, we found ourselves at the scene of the crime (of course we, as random citizens, were allowed access to it), where Dupre scrutinized everything in minute detail while saying absolutely nothing. And just for fun and to build suspense, he wouldn’t talk about the murder until the following day.

“Didn’t you notice anything peculiar?” He asked later. “Since no one could be sure what language the murderer spoke, it was obviously F. None Of The Above. Oh, and by the way, despite the danger I’m waiting for an accomplice to this whole shebang, so you should probably ready your pistol. Anyway, I imagined that there was probably a secret way of getting out of the window, and thanks to my Power of Imagination, there was, due to a conveniently broken nail. And though it seems there would be no way of getting down from such a high window, I’m quite sure it’s possible for anyone agile enough.”

“Could this have been done by a madman?” I asked.

“That,” said Dupre, “would make too much sense. Here, take a look at this hair.” He placed in my hand a strand of long white hair. “You will perceive that it is not a human hair. Remember that the women were cut, and one was stuffed up a chimney.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was a flying unicorn,” Dupre said.

I, of course, began laughing at the joke.

“No really,” he said. “It was a unicorn. Only a unicorn could have flown up to the window and cut the women with its horn.”

“How did it stuff Mlle L’Espoir up the chimney?”

“It’s a flying unicorn. It can do anything. Anyway, I’m sure someone must have recently misplaced a flying unicorn, so I advertised in the paper.”

Naturally, the man arrived and explained everything (once he saw Dupre’s Super-Analysis pistol), and of course it happened exactly as Dupre had said. The flying unicorn was later caught by its owner, no one was prosecuted, and all’s well that ends well (except for the L’Espoir women, I suppose).

“But it doesn’t quite add up,” the Prefect of Police said.

But the Prefect, as you and I now know, is only a man of genius, and he can never be expected to understand the true Powers of Analysis.

Response:

I wanted to combine a number of different aspects of detective fiction in the satire, and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” has most of the aspects I was interested in (likely because Poe sort of laid the groundwork for the genre).

I like the first-person aspect of the detective stories we’ve read, because it seems like it pulls the reader in closer than a third-person story would. The narrative style of the Dupin tales is particularly interesting, and I wanted to use (somewhat) the same narrative style that Poe uses, as it sounds as though the narrator is talking to the reader personally, as he often pauses to clarify himself or to make some statement about the purpose of a certain portion of the text.

Arrogance and pride have a place (however large or small) in all of the detective stories we’ve read. At times in this particular story, the narrator seemed quite proud and Dupin seemed arrogant, and I definitely wanted to play that up in the satire.

Additionally, I was interested in how dry Dupin’s character is. In comparison with Holmes, who is shooting up cocaine and/or morphine (I’m pretty sure at one point Watson asks which one he’s doing that day), Dupin is ridiculously tame and dry. I suppose that maybe in this story’s day, the secrets for his decline into poverty may have been interesting for the reader, but I couldn’t exactly say I was intrigued. It didn’t have any effect on his character except maybe his odd love of seclusion. Dupin seemed to exist only to analyze, and he wasn’t really a three-dimensional character (I’m sure you could argue otherwise, but for me, I had a hard time liking him as a person. I found myself interested in the plot more than the characters.)

The relationship between the main sleuth and his companion interested me as well. I don’t think that Dupin was exactly looking down on the narrator, as I sort of hinted, but it doesn’t seem like they have as equal (or somewhat-equal) of a relationship as Holmes does with Watson, who even did a little investigation on his own. The narrator seems—especially in this story—to be there mostly so that someone can write down Dupin’s adventures and be surprised at Dupin’s solutions to the cases (essentially, he’s just a sidekick).

I enjoyed all the talk about the power of the imagination, and how imagining what happened lets the detective sort of allow endless possibilities, even unrealistic ones, and narrow them down (and I think there was something similar in “Silver Blaze” where Holmes imagines what happens and it turns out to be true). So of course I exaggerated the imaginative aspect.

Finally, as for the ending: I know that there was all that evidence that an orangutan had committed the crime, but it really felt more like a cop-out ending to me. It was such a wild ending to what had previously been a tame story that it shocked me. It was almost like Poe couldn’t think of an actual ending that would fit realistically, so he made up this thing about an escaped orangutan (I mean, really?). The twist was fantastic, of course, but I had been hoping for something more realistic.

All in all, though, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” makes a great groundwork for future detective stories, since you can kind of see the sources for all of the classic tropes.