Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin- Good noses and their companions

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Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin- Good noses and their companions 1. Introduction In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe published his ‘tale() of detection’ (Lesser 1900) Murders in the Rue Morgue with which he ushered in a new era of detective stories (cf. Kayman 2003:41). The central character of the Murders in the Rue Morgue, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, is the archetype of analytical detectives. He is the first in literary history who solves crimes using only the enormous potential of his mind (cf. ibid: 44). It would be too much to claim that without Edgar Allan Poe the crime genre would not have subsisted, but its progress would definitely not have been that rapid and many of its elements would probably have been of quite a different nature. But it was his successor who became the most famous detective of all time: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’ stories were not highly regarded by Doyle, but became his most prominent work; Holmes’ name has even become a synonym for a detective who unravels apparently insolvable mysteries. Sherlock Holmes got so famous that he even eclipsed his creator (cf. Knight 1980:68). There are so many similarities between Dupin and Holmes that some critics accuse Doyle of larceny of Poe’s ideas; some even call him a ‘freebooter’ (Lesser 1900). This seems to be a reasonable suspicion when one considers that ‘Poe′s masterful detective, M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of (Doyle’s) heroes’ (Doyle 1944,47). And, indeed, the procedural method of the two detectives seems to be similar at first glance. Especially in the Sherlock Holmes adventure the Speckled Band, many elements can be found which obviously echo plot details and character traits of the Murders in the Rue Morgue. I chose to write about those detective stories because they fascinated me. Even while I was reading them for the third time with the awareness of who
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