The Fall of the House of Musgrave

In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.’ But Bell was not the only source for Holmes. His literary model was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘masterful’ Parisian detective, Le Chavalier C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), and reappeared in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Poe was one of the most powerful literary influences on Doyle’s writing.