Nothing could be franker than Sir Conan Doyle’s acknowledgment of his indebtedness.  “Edgar Allen Poe, who, in his carelessly prodigal fashion, threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own.  For the secret of the thinness and also of the intensity of the detective-story is that the writer is left with only one quality, that of intellectual acuteness, with which to endow his hero.  Everything else is outside the picture and weakens the effect.  The problem and its solution must form the theme, and the character drawing is limited and subordinate.  On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the footmarks of Poe always in front of him.  He is happy if he ever finds the means of breaking away and striking out on some little side-track of his own.”

The deviser of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes hit on a happy phrase when he declared that “the problem and its solution must form the theme.”  This principle was violated by Dumas, in the ’Vicomte de Bragelonne,’ giving us the solution before the problem, when he showed how d’Artagnan used the method of Zadig to deduce all the details of the duel on horseback, after the author had himself described to us the incidents of that fight.  But when he was thus discounting his effect Dumas probably had in mind, not Poe, but Cooper, whose observant redskins he mightily admired and whom he frankly imitated in the ‘Mohicans of Paris.’

V

Altho Poe tells these three stories in the first person, as if he was himself only the recorder of the marvelous deeds of another, both Legrand and Dupin are projections of his own personality; they are characters created by him to be endowed with certain of his own qualifications and peculiarities.  They were called into being to be possest of the inventive and analytical powers of Poe himself.  “To be an artist, first and always, requires a turn for induction and analysis”—­so Mr. Stedman has aptly put it; and this turn for induction and analysis Poe had far more obviously than most artists.  When he was a student he excelled in mathematics; in all his other tales he displays the same power of logical construction; and he delighted in the exercise of his own acumen, vaunting his ability to translate any cipher that might be sent to him and succeeding in making good his boast.  In the criticism of ‘Barnaby Rudge,’ and again in the explanation of the Maelzel chess-player, Poe used for himself the same faculty of divination, the same power of seizing the one clue needful, however tangled amid other threads, which he had bestowed upon Legrand and Dupin.