I suppose everyone knows this but I didn’t.
In 1841 The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe was published. It is the first of three stories about Dupin who is an amateur detective living in Paris with an unnamed friend who narrates the stories.
“Dupin is not a professional detective and his motivations for solving the mysteries change throughout the three stories. Using what Poe termed “ratiocination”, Dupin combines his considerable intellect with creative imagination, even putting himself in the mind of the criminal. His talents are strong enough that he appears able to read the mind of his companion, the unnamed narrator of all three stories.
In the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Doctor Watson compares Holmes to Dupin, to which Holmes replies: “No doubt you think you are complimenting me … In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow… He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appears to imagine”. Alluding to an episode in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, where Dupin deduces what his friend is thinking despite their having walked together in silence for a quarter of an hour, Holmes remarks: “That trick of his breaking in on his friend’s thoughts with an apropos remark… is really very showy and superficial”; nevertheless, Holmes later performs the same ‘trick’ on Watson in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” (Wikipedia)
Conan Doyle greatly admired EAP and got some flak for criticising Dupin but as he said it’s not me saying that, it is Holmes, and we have EAP to thank for Sherlock Holmes.
You should think of Eugene-Francois Vidocq, Napoleon’s detective, founder of the Surete,
and whose real life methodology inspired all the fictional successors created by EAP and ACD.
That is something else I didn’t know and very interesting, thank you.