7/23/2023 0 Comments Detective dupin![]() ![]() The statement is ironic because he himself displays the traits he claims to detest Dupin for. He had some analytical genius, no doubt but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.” That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. ![]() “ Now in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. ![]() But the biggest proof is given by Sherlock Holmes himself, in a highly ironic statement alluding to Dupin in the first ever novel to feature the detective, A Study in Scarlet:. Doyle himself has admitted to his veneration of Edgar Allan Poe and deemed him the “the father of the detective tale”. What then, makes one compare them in the first place? For one, Mr. Since all three are short stories, there’s no space or need for character-building. Poe’s are only about the philosophies behind the solution and the process by which it is arrived at. Arthur Canon Doyle’s stories are not only about the mystery, but about their characters also. We don’t feel any emotional inclination with the two as we feel with Holmes and Watson. The narrator seems to be only a device to maintain an objective distance from Dupin, to retain the mystery and the extraordinariness of his quick mind. Dupin, on his part, is also always seen in the company of an unnamed narrator, but there’s hardly any camaraderie visible there. John Watson, the narrator of almost all the stories featuring Holmes. He also shares a dynamic relationship with his housemate, Dr. We know about Sherlock’s idiosyncrasies (he plays the violin to help him think), relations (he has an older brother named Mycroft) and, to some extent, his appearance (readers had been conditioned to picture him with a pipe and a deerstalker hat). So unlike Dupin, we actually get to trace his evolution as a character. Of course, Holmes got to feature in forty stories, four of them being novels. Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, moves about a lot (although that might be because, Detective being a real thing by the time, he can officially be invited to the crime scene by the police) and the suspense element is given more time and space in the stories. Poe’s explanations either employ or refute many popular philosophical and mathematical theories of the time they are a kind of “mini-dissertations” as many critics like to call them. The explanations are also very noteworthy they might seem pretty simplistic to today’s readers, but they held a special significance at the time they were written it. ![]() It is the explanation of the entire mystery, rather than the solution itself, that forms the crux of the Dupin stories. Also, unlike later stereotypes of the very detective stories that Poe gave a basis to, the mystery and its solution make up less than half of the tale, as most of it is devoted to Dupin explaining how he arrived at the solution. In fact, in The Purloined Letter, the actual events do not even move beyond the confines of the small room Dupin is sitting in, and the incidents concerning the theft of the letter, the crime the story focuses on, and the extraction of the letter by Dupin, are all narrated within the story. He was more of a passive thinker, and these stories weren’t generally very eventful. Since a thing called the Detective didn’t exist at the time, Dupin was made out to be an exceptionally intellectual human being with heightened powers of observation who the Prefect of the Police, a friend of Dupin’s, sometimes came to for suggestions (which ended up being the definition of a “Private Detective”). He first appeared in Murders in Rue Morgue and followed it up with The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter, which is the most critically acclaimed of the three. Poe’s French detective (a designation given to the character in hindsight, since the word “detective” hadn’t been coined then), Dupin, has a literary life of three short stories, famously termed by their author as “Tales of Ratiocination”. Why then, is Dupin so unknown amongst the larger public while Holmes continues to get all the adulation? Let us weigh the scales. Edgar Allan Poe, his creator, has been credited with initiating the entire genre of “detective fiction”. Auguste Dupin to intrude, who happens to be a precursor for Mr. and Benedict Cumberbatch, the most recent Sherlocks, it would be a good time for C. With the current lot swooning over Robert Downey Jr. He has been popularly touted as “the most enacted character of all time”, spanning the stage, television and cinema-halls. Sherlock Holmes has long been immortalised in readers’ minds, more because of the incredible number of screen adaptations than the books themselves. ![]()
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