The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
       First Publication: The Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, Philadelphia,  April 1841.

On line: original text in English
& its French translation

Two women are horribly murdered while occupying a fourth story room of a house on Rue Morgue.
The room appears to be locked completely from the inside without any way for the killer to have exited. Dupin solves the mystery through a process of deduction. He discovers that the murders were committed by an orang-outang that had escaped it's sailor owner and had come in through an apparently securly nailed window.

"Murders in the Rue Morgue" is not only considered the first detective story but it also set standards for this genre. Poe creates the first of the hundreds to follow "locked-room mysteries."