As long-time readers know, I am big fan of murder mysteries, in books and in TV/film forms. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie constituted much of my reading as a boy. Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes has often been seen as the archetype of the private detective, able to see clues and solve crimes where the official police force could not, and his biographer John Watson served the role of the narrator, observant enough to be a surrogate for the reader and was able to tell us broadly what was seen by Holmes, without being able to distinguish between what was relevant and what was superfluous, and thus unable to make the crucial inferences that Holmes did.
But recently I came across the story The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe that was published in 1840 and is credited as being the first modern detective story and it is clear that Doyle was inspired by Poe’s story.
In the earlier story, we again have a friendship between two men, the unnamed narrator in Poe’s case who meets and befriends an eccentric acute observer in August Dupin and the two share lodgings in Paris. Poe’s narrator records his observations of Dupin, and we immediately see the similarities to Holmes, in that Dupin also has acute powers of observation and superlative analytical and deductive skills.
I soon noticed a special reasoning power he had, an unusual reasoning power. Using it gave him great pleasure. He told me once, with a soft and quiet laugh, that most men have windows over their hearts; through these he could see into their souls. Then, he surprised me by telling what he knew about my own soul; and I found that he knew things about me that I had thought only I could possibly know. His manner at these moments was cold and distant. His eyes looked
empty and far away, and his voice became high and nervous. At such times it seemed to me that I saw not just Dupin, but two Dupins — one who coldly put things together, and another who just as coldly took them apart.
More similarities between Dupin and Holmes are revealed as the story progresses, such as the following.
One night we were walking down one of Paris’s long and dirty streets. Both of us were busy with our thoughts. Neither had spoken for perhaps fifteen minutes. It seemed as if we had each forgotten that the other was there, at his side. I soon learned that Dupin had not forgotten me, however. Suddenly he said:
“You’re right. He is a very little fellow, that’s true, and he would be more successful if he acted in lighter, less serious plays.”
“Yes, there can be no doubt of that!” I said.
At first I saw nothing strange in this. Dupin had agreed with me, with my own thoughts. This, of course, seemed to me quite natural. For a few seconds I continued walking, and thinking; but suddenly I realized that Dupin had agreed with something which was only a thought. I had not spoken a single word. I stopped walking and turned to my friend. “Dupin,” I said, “Dupin, this is beyond my understanding. How could you know that I was thinking of….” Here I stopped, in order to test him, to learn if he really did know my unspoken thoughts.
“How did I know you were thinking of Chantilly? Why do you stop? You were thinking that Chantilly is too small for the plays in which he acts.”
“That is indeed what I was thinking. But, tell me, in Heaven’s name, the method — if method there is — by which you have been able to see into my soul in this matter.”
Dupin then explains to him his observations of the narrator’s behavior over the past few minutes that enabled his to piece together his conclusions.
Readers of the Holmes canon will immediately find that familiar. It can be found in the Holmes’ story The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, where Doyle gives a nod to Poe.
Finding that Holmes was too absorbed for conversation I had tossed side the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair I fell into a brown study. Suddenly my companion’s voice broke in upon my thoughts: “You are right, Watson,” said he. “It does seem a most preposterous way of settling a dispute.”
“Most preposterous!” I exclaimed, and then suddenly realizing how he had echoed the inmost thought of my soul, I sat up in my chair and stared at him in blank amazement.
“What is this, Holmes?” I cried. “This is beyond anything which I could have imagined.”
He laughed heartily at my perplexity. “You remember,” said he, “that some little time ago when I read you the passage in one of Poe’s sketches in which a close reasoner follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion, you were inclined to treat the matter as a mere tour-de-force of the author. On my remarking that I was constantly in the habit of doing the same thing you expressed incredulity.”
This is repeated in The Adventure of the Dancing Men.
Holmes had been seated for some hours in silence with his long, thin back curved over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product. His head was sunk upon his breast, and he looked from my point of view like a strange, lank bird, with dull grey plumage and a black top-knot.
“So, Watson,” said he, suddenly, “you do not propose to invest in South African securities?”
I gave a start of astonishment. Accustomed as I was to Holmes’s curious faculties, this sudden intrusion into my most intimate thoughts was utterly inexplicable.“How on earth do you know that?” I asked.
In each case, Holmes explains the sequences of observations, in manner similar to Dupin.
There were two subsequent Dupin stories and similarities to Holmes in Dupin’s behavior and the crimes can be seen. When I read The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I was also immediately struck by the similarity of a key element in the plot to the Holmes novel The Sign of Four.
SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ FURTHER AS THE PLOT WILL BE REVEALED
Recently I was able to use that knowledge to ‘solve’ a small mystery in my own life. One morning, we discovered that during the night, the Bridge Center where I play had been broken into and the place trashed. It was clear that the intruder had entered through the ceiling because there was debris of a broken ceiling tile on the ground but oddly enough had not taken the only things of any real value which were the computers. How had the intruder scaled the outside of the building and got in? And how had the intruder gone out again? Doing so would require both great agility and small stature. In looking at the damage (the overturned chairs, the destruction of the window shades, the opening of containers with the contents strewn around, the dirty marks on the walls), it immediately reminded me of the Poe story in which the killings had been done by an escaped gorilla that was able to enter the apartment by scaling the outside wall and entering through the skylight. A similar plot device is used in the Holmes story.
Of course, there are unlikely to be any gorillas in the part of California but I thought it likely that the culprit was an animal and sure enough, it was later found to be a raccoon. Someone has since been brought in to seal the roof securely to prevent this happening again.
Hopefully the poor surprised procyonus was escorted out? Otherwise you may have another hole to patch.
Not a gorilla, an orangutan
Yes, in The Sign Of Four, the intruder was a pygmy-size person that was assisting the primary--for lack of a better term--villain. Interestingly, in the Jeremy Brett Holmes series, that villain was portrayed by the actor John Thaw, who would soon go on to become TV’s Inspector Morse.
Dupin is also in The Purloined Letter with a plot that has some similarities to a Holmes story or two.
I’m as astonished as Watson at Mano reading my mind -- I’ve recently listened to the entire Conan Doyle Holmes canon on audiobook, having never read but one or two of the stories when I was a boy, and immediately recognised every one of the references.
By what observation did you know this Mano!!
Anyway, I know this will be no news to Mano, but Doyle himself said Holmes was based on real-life Joseph Bell.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell
@crivitz:
“Interestingly, in the Jeremy Brett Holmes series, that villain was portrayed by the actor John Thaw, who would soon go on to become TV’s Inspector Morse.”
In 1985, David Suchet played Inspector Japp in a TV movie of Agatha Christie’s 13 at Dinner, and he subsequently went on to play Poirot in adapting every single Poirot story Christie ever wrote. Fun bit of trivia, I suppose.
I haven’t read anything by Doyle, but I have read all of Poe, and I’m mildly disappointed that you got the wrong ape. As #2 said, it was an Orangutan.
By the way, if anyone else is interested in the original canon on Holmes, there are (reasonably) faithful dramatizations on YouTube of much (not all) of the original stories -- including “Cardboard Box” and “Dancing Men”:
“Dr Bell would sit in his receiving room…and diagnose people as they came in, before they even opened their mouths.
Which is a really bad practice, even if it works all the time (which I guarantee it won’t). Even the most observant physician would still have to ask the right questions and get clarification or confirmation of their guesses. Medicine is not engineering or mechanics, it’s about people, and even if they don’t know anything the physician didn’t guess, it’s still important for the patients to know they’re being heard and taken seriously. (And a physician can’t possibly know they’ve guessed everything correctly unless/until they’ve confirmed it with the patient. That’s not the kind of thing anyone can blithely assume.)
I certainly would not be inclined to trust this Dr. Bell person. He sounds too much like, say, a male doctor who presumes to know all he needs to know about wimmin’s health concerns without ever listening to any real women; or a White doctor who presumes to diagnose Black patients without knowing enough about conditions particular to Black neighborhoods that Whites never notice. And on top of all that, the “Red Indian” reference kinda hinted at a bit of “noble savage” stereotyping — the practitioner of ancient exotic tribal wisdom enhancing our Western Enlightenment understanding, etc. etc.
If memory serves, Holmes insults Dupin in Hound of the Baskervilles.
Matt G.,
I did a search of that book and did not find any mention of Dupin or Poe. Of course, Doyle may have alluded to him without mentioning him by name.
Matt G. And Mano,
It was in A Study in Scarlet:
“No doubt you think you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin… 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.”
It is without doubt that Doyle was inspired by Poe despite this insult. I would really like to know what inspired Poe in the first place.
Hopefully the roof was indeed sealed well, since skunks also can get curious about new spaces to get into. Friends heard noises downstairs one night, and fearing a burglar, crept down the stairs quietly. They found a skunk raiding the kitchen. They went back upstairs, closed the door at the top of the stairs, and dealt with the mess and the entry point the next day.
A fond memory; in my student days, someone gave me The Complete Sherlock Holmes as a Xmas present. After everyone else had gone to bed, I would brew a pot of coffee and stay up reading it in the silence until dawn. It took several nights.
Raging Bee #9
I totally agree with you, but I suspect there may have been intention to this kind of behavior beyond mere male delusions of grandeur. Medicine was still in its infancy. Anatomy in particular was struggling to get respect. Medical schools had to pay shady characters to rob graves in order to get the cadavers they needed to study (yes, this was wrong, too). If they could get the general public to respect medicine more, they could come out of the shadows and get donated bodies plus other benefits like government grants and donations from rich people, and medicine could progress much faster.
Of course, it’s obvious Conan Doyle was not the true creator of Sherlock Holmes! Holmes was rational and logical, while Conan Doyle was taken in not just by the spiritualists, but by the fraudulent “Cottingley Fairies” photographs! And we know that Conan Doyle greatly resented the fact that the Holmes stories were rated as far superior to his “other” fictions, none of which are read nowadays -- unsurprising if Holmes was not really his! The remaining mystery is -- who was the real author of the stories? My hypothesis is that it was Dr. James Watson (see below), late of the Indian Army, who was desperate for money (he was trying to live on an army pension after being badly wounded in Afghanistan), and who made the arrangement with Conan Doyle -- who, unlike Watson, was already a well-known author -- to publish the stories under his name and split the proceeds. Why James Watson? In The Man with a Twisted Lip Watson’s wife refers to him as “James”. Clearly, Watson forgot for the moment that he had changed his name to “John” in the stories!
morescienceplz @#12
Thanks for that information. A Study in Scarlet was the very first Sherlock Holmes story and it may be that later Doyle wanted to use that mind-reading trick and so softened his view.
moarscienceplz@12- Yes. I couldn’t remember if Holmes was conversing with Watson or Dr. Mortimer.
KG @#16,
The problem with that fun hypothesis is that Watson first refers to having been shot in the shoulder in A Study in Scarlet and then later in the leg in The Sign of Four. A real Watson is hardly likely to make such a mistake about his own wound while the occasionally sloppy Doyle might.
moarscienceplz @15: Fair point. Medicine in Doyle’s time was nowhere near where it is now; so a guy like Dr. Bell could still do better than most of his contemporaries even without having to listen to his patients before making a guesstimate.
I’ve just noticed my link at #8 to a playlist has been converted to an embedded video. I forgot that WordPress very enthusiastically tries to embed any links to YouTube unless you go to great lengths to forestall it.
So if I may do so without being immediately descended upon by the usual idiots calling for my instant banning for correcting my own comment: The link was supposed to be to this playlist of 42 videos (one a duplicate) where you’ll find 41 dramatizations of original Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, including two of the (four) novels.
Enjoy if you’re so inclined.
They make no attempt to be in order, but that’s fair as the original stories made no attempt to be chronological (apart from the first one). The conceit was that these were Watson’s reminiscences and so they could be set during any era of Holmes’ career regardless of when they were published.
P.S. Regrettably missing is A Study in Scarlet, the original story that gave the back story of Watson and Holmes and how they came to be sharing lodgings at 221B Baker St. Much of the mystery of the first story is what on earth Holmes does for a living. He seems to be very well informed on esoteric subjects and completely ignorant on more general knowledge, and is always performing chemical experiments, so Watson is at first perplexed as to what his eccentric fellow lodger is all about. X-D
I know I’m late to this particular party (busy weekend), but I have a few comments.
Where did Poe get the character of Dupin? Hard to say, but characters with similar attributes show up in a few of Poe’s poems and short stories, in particular, The Gold Bug. They generally seem to be characters with independent means, not rich but not dependent on earning a living, well educated, erudite, and avid readers. Usually associated with twilight, or darkness, and isolated from other people. My own opinion is that these characters are an author surrogate for Poe himself. If you set aside the poems and stories filled with melancholy and containing an author surrogate, the remaining works are an eclectic mix of poorly written humor, general knowledge, and some satire. I suspect this odd mixture of styles and tones were the results of him working as an author for hire, writing on whatever subject he could get paid for. The Mystery of Marie Roget, a Dupin story, is itself a very interesting work in that Poe didn’t create the mystery out of whole cloth, instead he took a current, rather sordid, crime (which had not been adequately resolved), and fictionalized it. It may be one of the first “True Crime Fiction” stories. There were previously published books relating the history of crimes and criminals, probably the most famous was The Newgate Calendar, but I don’t know of a previous work which used the framework of fiction to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
In the 40 years between Poe’s Dupin, first published in 1841, and Doyle’s Holmes in 1887, there are detective stories and novels written. The most significant was probably Charles Felix’s The Notting Hill Mystery, which was originally a serial but published as arguably the first true mystery novel in 1865. There were plenty of detective short stories written, at various levels of complexity and skill, but much like the development of the F&SF in the 1920’s to 1940’s (with precursors reaching back to the 1880’s), the detective story was not viewed as entertainment for “educated” people. In 1866,
Emile Gaboriau published his first detective novel with the character, Monsieur Lecoq, a detective who like Dupin, and Holmes afterwards, examines the scene of a crime and re-constructs the crime from the clues which are present. Doyle mentions Gaboriau, and Holmes calls Lecoq a bungler, so it’s clear that Doyle knew of Gaboriau’s works. Interesting enough, as an aside, it is also clear that in Agatha Christie’s second Poirot novel, The Murder on the Links (1923) Monsieur Giraud of the Sûreté is a pastiche of Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq. In 1881 Gaboriau’s novels were translated into English and by all reports Doyle immensely enjoyed them. So, while Dr. Bell was no doubt something of an inspiration to Doyle, I suspect that Gaboriau’s novels also had a major influence. Doyle being Doyle, however, admitting that his major influence was from a French writer may have seemed unpatriotic.
In fact, in the early Holmes stories, the impression I get from Doyle’s work is that Doyle was trying to create a new type of detective. In the first few stories, it is suggested that Holmes rarely goes to look at a crime scene. Instead, Holmes’ knowledge of past crime combined with his analytical mind, was enough to be a “consulting” detective. I.e. people come to Holmes for a consultation about the crime they are trying to solve. Holmes doesn’t go looking for work and he usually just offers advice which leads other investigators the correct conclusions. If that was Doyle’s intention, and I think it originally was, then Doyle was not successful. Probably because a story about someone sitting and thinking is pretty dull, which is likely why A Study in Scarlet has a second part which is really an adventure story set in the American west.
Other fictional detectives have made similar claims. Poirot frequently claimed that visiting the scene of the crime was unnecessary, as long as he had an acquaintance available to ask the questions he wanted to ask. Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe who almost never leaves his office, or house. But in order to make the novels interesting Nero Wolfe has an active partner in Archie Goodwin, who is also Wolfe’s factotum.
The success of Doyle’s Holmes spawned dozens of imitations. Some authors, like Edgar Wallace, were more about blood and bodies then clues and plots. They were adventure stories with the framework of solving crimes. Other authors worked on establishing the “rules” of good mystery writing. Carolyn Wells, in 1913, wrote an essay called The Technique of the Mystery Story which established the basic principles of mystery writing; including the idea that readers should have the same facts as the detective, and should be given an opportunity to solve the mystery before the denouement. A rule which has been broken to a lessor or greater extent by pretty much every mystery author since. I know of only two mystery authors who really tried to abide by that rule, John Dickson Carr, and the authors who collaborated to create the pseudonym Ellery Queen, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. The Ellery Queen stories are almost unique in that they usually halt the narrative at some point and explicitly tell the reader that they have provided all the clues necessary to solve the mystery.
I could go on (and on, and on), it’s a subject I enjoy, but I really should get some work done today.
flex @#22,
As always from you, a fascinating essay that provides a lot of interesting information.
Thanks!
Mano@19,
Well, initially Watson took considerable trouble to disguise his identity, including misdescribing his wound, but later grew careless — or perhaps actually wanted to be tracked down and so given the credit he deserved!