Murders in the Rue Morgue

This is the one that started it all. Before Sherlock Holmes, before Hercule Poirot, there was C. Auguste Dupin, and he changed fiction forever. Poe's 1841 masterpiece invented the detective story, the locked-room mystery, and the brilliant amateur sleuth who solves the unsolvable through pure reason. A mother and daughter are slaughtered in their Paris apartment. The horror: the windows were sealed from within, the doors locked. Yet the killer escaped. The police find an impossibility. They find a madman's ferocity. What they cannot find is a suspect. Into this chaos steps Dupin and his anonymous narrator companion, applying logic to the illogical, using observation and deduction to unravel what passion and panic could not. The solution is shocking, the reasoning elegant. If you've ever loved a detective story, you're reading your origin story.