C. Auguste Dupin : The First Great Detective

In her autobiography Christie admits that with Poirot "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp.

For his part Conan Doyle acknowledged basing Sherlock Holmes on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's fictional French detective C. Auguste Dupin, who in his use of "ratiocination" prefigures Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells".

C. Auguste Dupin is a fictional detective created by Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), widely considered the first detective fiction story. He reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).Detective fiction, however, had no real precedent and the word detective had not yet been coined when Poe first introduced Dupin.

Interesting Facts

Doyle once said, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?"

In the first 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," despite the fact that the detective was evidently inspired by the other.