Kindred Crimes: Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Doyle’s The Sign of Four

Abstract

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bestowed high praise on the literary achievements of Edgar Allan Poe, describing him in particular as the father of the modern detective story. Doyle’s debt to Poe is most evident in the way he modeled Sherlock Holmes on C. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual detective–hero of three of Poe’s tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” While comparative analyses of Poe’s and Doyle’s writings have rightly focused on the likenesses between the detectives in their stories, a striking similarity also exists between two of the cases those detectives investigated. After identifying numerous parallels between Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890) and Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the article concludes that Doyle, without ever acknowledging his source, took his novel’s basic plot from Poe’s short story.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s debt to Edgar Allan Poe’s genius is most evident in his having modeled the character of Sherlock Holmes on that of C. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual detective–hero of three of Poe’s tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” As Doyle recalled, “Poe’s masterful detective, M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes.”¹ Indeed, when Doyle presided at a special dinner honoring the centenary of Poe’s birth, he proclaimed:

His tales were one of the great landmarks and starting points in the literature of the last century for French as well as English writers. For those tales have been so pregnant with suggestion, so stimulating to the minds of others, that it may be said of many of them that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed. . . . His original and inventive brain was always trying daring experiments, always opening up pioneer tracks for other men to explore. It is the irony of fate that he should have died in poverty, for if every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument, it would be such as would dwarf the Pyramids. . . . Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?²

Furthermore, in his book of literary reminiscences, Through the Magic Door, Doyle confessed his literary debt in the following words:

To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime—“quorum pars parva fui!” [“of whom I have been a small part!”] Each may find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point. After all, mental acuteness is the one quality which can be ascribed to the ideal detective, and when that has once been admirably done, succeeding writers must necessarily be content for all time to follow in the same main track.³

Comparative analyses of Poe and Doyle have rightly focused on the similarities between the detectives in their stories. Except for the companionship of a single friend who chronicles their achievements, both Holmes and Dupin live reclusive lives. Their chief pleasure comes from applying their keen minds to the astonishing solution of otherwise baffling mysteries through the discovery and close analysis of often-overlooked evidence, much to the dismay of the regular police whose crude methods they regard with disdain.⁴

Beyond these multiple likenesses between the two detectives, there are significant similarities between two of the cases they investigated.⁵ In Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841),⁶ two women, a mother and a daughter, are murdered in an apartment on the fourth floor of a house in Paris. The most baffling aspect of the crime is how the killer or killers entered, since the door to the apartment and the...