On this day in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was published in Philadelphia's Graham's Magazine. It is generally considered to be the first detective story, called "a tale of ratiocination" by Poe as the word "detective" did not yet exist. Poe realized that he had "something in a new key," but he could not have known that he was giving the nascent genre many of its prototypes: the 'locked-room' crime, the sidekick-narrator, and the gentleman-amateur detective, from whom no orangutan can hope to escape ... FULL STORY »
