The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Summary

In a Paris newspaper, there appears a report of an extraordinary crime committed on the Rue Morgue. Alarmed by the nightly screams, the residents of the district broke into the building, where in a room locked from the inside, they saw furniture destroyed and overturned in disorder, and soon after found the bodies of the brutally murdered women: the owner of the house and her daughter. How did the killer manage to escape? What was the motive for this crime? Why was it committed with such cruelty? The police are unable to solve the case. Intrigued, Dupin decides to conduct his own investigation.
The first of Edgar Allan Poe's tales in which an anonymous narrator presents the most spectacular cases of his friend, C. Auguste Dupin. The stories about the brilliant eccentric who uses deduction and analysis of others' thought processes constitute the first modern detective works, and the character of Dupin became the prototype for subsequent literary detectives, including Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.