Poe & the French Connection
A reporter asked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1894 if he had been influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe. The creator of Sherlock Holmes replied, “Oh, immensely! His detective is the best detective in fiction.”
The reporter asked if that assessment included Sherlock Holmes.
“I make no exception…,” Conan Doyle declared. “Dupin is unrivalled.”
Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is the amateur detective who appears in Poe’s stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), and “
The Purloined Letter” (1844), predating Sherlock Holmes’s debut in A Study in Scarlet by nearly fifty years. These tales have rightfully earned Poe the reputation as the father of the modern mystery. Other writers, such as Dickens, wrote about crime and criminal enterprises, but no one before Poe made the crime and its detection the central plot. Poe was the first to make the amateur detective a hero
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But while Sherlock Holmes uses his keen observations to uncover otherwise hidden truths, Dupin has the ability to replicate the thought processes of others and in effect, read minds.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/sherlock_holmes/3.html?sect=18
