Abstract

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bestowed high praise on the literary achievements of Edgar Allan Poe, describing him in particular as the father of the modern detective story. Doyle's debt to Poe is most evident in the way he modeled Sherlock Holmes on C. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual detective–hero of three of Poe's tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” While comparative analyses of Poe's and Doyle's writings have rightly focused on the likenesses between the detectives in their stories, a striking similarity also exists between two of the cases those detectives investigated. After identifying numerous parallels between Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) and Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the article concludes that Doyle, without ever acknowledging his source, took his novel's basic plot from Poe's short story.

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