The Murders in the Rue Morgue

One of those seminal stories that somehow touch us through the ages with us being unaware of that is "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".  
This short tale was written by none other than Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 and it is considered the first detective story though Poe never used the term. Apparently he just wanted to tell a good story, of course a story as he envisioned stories. One of its essential characteristics is that Poe tells the story as if he were one of the characters, in this case the main character's personal friend. 
The story is set in France and describes the investigation of the murders of two women, an old lady and her daughter who had been horribly murdered. The Police of France is in the case but they are unable to solve the crime. They are not even able to find out why the women were murdered the way they did, so they decide to ask the intervention of C. Auguste Dupin, a brilliant man who serves as a detective in cases too complicate for the Police to solve. 
It is Dupin who following a simple reasoning process the one that finds out the real and chilling nature of the murders. After discarding every possible option he decides to consider the impossible, and he is right, for the killer of the two ladies is no man or woman, in fact is not even a human being. 
If the soncept is familiar to you and looks like a Sherlock Holmes kind of story, then you are right and at the same time you are wrong because the first Sherlock Holmes story was published in 1887. However, many of the elements that would grace Holmes later on were already in C. Auguste Dupin: the brilliant detective, the loyal friend, the impossible crime, the reasoning process, the incompetent Police officers and the unexpected solution. 
Dupin is then the first detective and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is such an important contribution to our culture that even today we witness the results of such contribution. 
Was there  not another Sherlock Holmes movie in 2012? Are there not TV series such as C.S.I. that have, and continue doing so, garnered millions of followers? We all love a good mystery story and we all love be surprised and find out that the murder was that caracter we would never suspect of. Heck, there is a reason why even Batman is a detective.
In sum, MITRM is a story to be read if only to understand or witness how all this interest about crime stories and detectives began. And of course to discover the murderer's identity in MITRM and as a result be amazed by the powerful imagination of the most prominent American author of all time.

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