victorian221b | If you eliminate the impossible (Reply)

Reading one of ACD’s early short stories, I came across the familiar maxim:

“It would be well,” the Scotsman concluded, “if those who express opinions upon such subjects would bear in mind those simple rules as to the analysis of evidence laid down by Auguste Dupin. ‘Exclude the impossible,’ he remarks in one of Poe’s immortal stories, ‘and what is left, however improbable, must be the truth.’” (The Fate of the Evangeline, 1885)

I tried to search the story where Dupin said that and found an interesting article comparing Poe and Doyle instead. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Hauntings of the “American Blood-Curdler” Beatriz González-Moreno draws parallels between the various works of the two authors as well as points out similarities in their lives. There she writes:

In fact, Dupin never said that but Doyle is certainly reworking the idea underlying passages such as the ones in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842-43): “I need scarcely tell you,” said Dupin, as he finished the perusal of my notes, “that this is a far more intricate case than that of the Rue Morgue; from which it differs in one important respect. This is an ordinary, although an atrocious instance of crime. There is nothing peculiarly outré about it. You will observe that, for this reason, the mystery has been considered easy, when, for this reason, it should have been considered difficult, of solution.”