Poe's Influence on Doyle

Although we discussed in class that Edgar Allen Poe definitely has some influence on Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series since Poe basically created the whole detective genre, it still surprises me to find out how profound his influence is after finishing reading “The Purloined Letter” and “A Scandal in Bohemia” back to back.

The detectives in both stories are trying to retrieve a stolen letter under the request of someone with royal background. The police are always portrayed as incompetent so that they have to seek help from Dupin or Sherlock. When it comes to the way the detectives verify their deduction and actually get their hands on the letter, both of them intentionally create a commotion at the house of letter’s possessor under disguise. However, it is also interesting to see how the two detectives’ motives differ. Dupin causes the chaos in order to prove the theory that the most exposed place is the safest for hiding about which he is very certain, whereas Sherlock doesn’t really have an answer before the commotion occurs. He is more prone to take advantage of the suspect’s psychology and acts on their responses accordingly.

Besides the setting of the plot, it is also shown that some wording in Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” is somehow similar to Poe’s. For example, when the Prefect is telling Dupin about all the efforts the police have made on searching Minister D---‘s house in “The Purloined Letter”, he says “He has been twice waylaid”. Coincidently, the King of Bohemia also expresses the same degree of desperation cause by five failed attempts of getting back the photograph: “Twice she has been waylaid”. Nevertheless, despite all the references made by Doyle, I would still say that these two authors have quite different narrating styles under the same detective genre. Poe definitely puts his focus on explanation of rational deduction solely by Dupin for most of the time while Doyle is good at push the deduction forward through real-time dialogues.