The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories: an analysis of selected tales

Abstract

The detective story has been and continues to be, enormously popular in our literary landscape. “It is read, either aggressively or shamefacedly by nearly everyone, and it must be, at the present moment, the most popular of all literary forms” (Krutch, 1944, included in Haycraft, 1946, p.179). The American author and poet Edgar Allan Poe is considered as the inventor of the detective fiction genre in the English-speaking world. With the publication of his tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, we encountered the first detective story, which along with his two other detective tales provided the conventions of character and narrative format for detective fiction and attracted many prominent writers. In fact, the British Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most important writers influenced by Poe’s style for the creation of his detective stories. Moreover, through reviewing other researches and studies, it was found that there is a shortage in the studies that explore the connections between Doyle’s and Poe’s stories. Therefore, this leads us to the aim of this paper, which is to analyse the influence that Poe had on Doyle. In order to develop this analysis, two stories by each writer will be compared taking into account, firstly, the writing style of both authors, and secondly, the characters involved in the stories. The results of the analysis are expected to show in which ways Poe influenced Doyle. Some conclusions can be drawn and hints for further research will be provided.