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.