uring record of the
investigations of Mr. Sherlock Holmes is the work of a certain Dr.
Watson, a human being but little more clearly characterized than the
anonymous narrators who have preserved for us the memory of Legrand and
Dupin. But Poe here again exhibited a more artistic reserve than any of
his imitators, in so far as he refrained from the undue laudation of the
strange intellectual feats which are the central interest of these
three tales. In the 'Gold-Bug' he even heightens his suspense by
allowing the narrator to suggest that Legrand might be of unsound mind;
and in the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' the narrator, altho lost in
astonishment at the acuteness of Dupin, never permits his admiration to
become fulsome; he holds himself in, as tho fearing that overpraise
might provoke a denial. Moreover, Poe refrained from all exhibitions of
Dupin's skill merely for its own sake--exhibitions only dazzling the
spectators and not furthering his immediate purpose.

Nothing could be franker than Sir Conan Doyle's acknowledgment of his
indebtedness. "Edgar Allen Poe, who, in his carelessly prodigal fashion,
threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of
literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and
covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers
can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own. For
the secret of the thinness and also of the intensity of the
detective-story is that the writer is left with only one quality, that
of intellectual acuteness, with which to endow his hero. Everything else
is outside the picture and weakens the effect. The problem and its
solution must form the theme, and the character drawing is limited and
subordinate. On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the
footmarks of Poe always in front of him. He is happy if he ever finds
the means of breaking away and striking out on some little side-track of
his own."

The deviser of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes hit on a happy phrase
when he declared that "the problem and its solution must form the
theme." This principle was violated by Dumas, in the 'Vicomte de
Bragelonne,' giving us the solution before the problem, when he showed
how d'Artagnan used the method of Zadig to deduce all the details of the
duel on horseback, after the author had himself described to us the
incidents of that fight. But when he was thus discounting his effect
Dumas probably ha