In this way, Holmes both acknowledges his predecessor and distances himself from him. “Now in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.” “No doubt you think you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. In fact, without Poe’s Dupin stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a struggling doctor in the south of England who was an avid fan of Poe, would have never had a model for his own fictional detective - one who even goes so far as to mention Dupin during his very first appearance in A Study in Scarlet : This central tenet of cerebral gamesmanship would become incredibly important in the later development of the detective story, especially the British variety. Essentially a working journalist, Poe created the detective story as a literary chess game of sorts, with Dupin as the master strategist. When “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published, Poe was better known throughout the East Coast as a biting literary critic and an erratic writer of macabre stories. Not bad for a hard-drinking eccentric and a failed soldier. Calling them “tales of ratiocination,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote only three stories involving Dupin: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 1842’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and 1844’s “The Purloined Letter.” Amazingly, each one of these tales provided a blueprint for later mystery sub-genres: the Gothic and gruesome murder mystery (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), the true-crime story (“The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which represents Poe’s thesis concerning the real-life murder of Mary Rogers) and the drawingroom blackmail scheme (“The Purloined Letter”). Auguste Dupin and his anonymous narrator laid the groundwork for detective fiction even before the word “detective” had been coined. Debuting in 1841 with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (which is generally believed to be the world’s first true piece of detective fiction), C. In short, he is the archetypal detective, and his constant companion and biographer can attest to it. More importantly, his is a large and intimidating intellect with an unbelievable ability to categorize a person based upon a single glance. He loves obscure volumes and he often busies himself with puzzles, cryptograms and other enigmas. He is a gentleman of leisure and strange reticence.
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