Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(102)

I did not rise to the challenge of that statement and instead demanded of him his name. The old man braced his hands on the bench and, with great apparent effort, pushed himself to a standing position. He was not particularly tall or imposing, and would not have been so even if he was a younger man, but there was something compelling about him nonetheless. He carried a weight of authority with him, which I have seldom encountered before except in my late friend, his brother, Mycroft, and a select few notables.

“Doctor Watson,” he said in a formal tone, “allow me to properly introduce myself. I am Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, late of Paris, and it is my pleasure to make your acquaintance.”



To say that I was flummoxed would be to understate my reaction. Once more I felt my anger rise. Had he not been old and frail, I would have thrashed him roundly and kicked him like a dog. He could no doubt see the anger on my face, for my cheeks burned with heat. His dark eyes twinkled with amusement and it took a very great effort of will not to spew at him the bilious words that formed on my tongue.

He nodded and sat down. “Yes, I see that I have done my credibility no service by admitting the truth of my identity.”

“Auguste Dupin does not exist,” I snapped. “He is entirely a product of fiction.”

“Do I appear to you to be a thing composed of nothing but ink and paper? Am I a dream, Doctor, or do you assert that I am nothing but the product of the fevered imagination of a drunken fool of an American writer? And a dead writer at that?”

“Of course not.”

“Nor a ghost met by ill chance in a graveyard?” He smiled and tipped his hat to the golden sun. “Though a strange and singular phantom would I be, were I capable of haunting you on so bright a day.”

“Neither phantom nor fiction,” I said, “but a man who has either taken leave of his senses, or who possesses a brand of humor that is both crude and ill-considered.”

“Neither of those things, I assure you,” he said. “My name is Dupin and if M. Poe has convinced the world that he created me out of whole cloth, then that is to the best.”

“In what possible way?”

“You are no doubt familiar with the lurid tales penned by the late Poe?”

“‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’” I said irritably, “and two or three others.”

“Two,” the old man corrected. “Badly written fantasies at best.”

“Come now, sir, this joke has gone far enough, and is in the poorest taste.”

“It is no joke, Doctor,” he said.

“You claim that you are a detective, then?”

He bristled. “I do not. Nor do I appreciate that label. I am a gentleman from a good family and am proud to be a member of the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur. Only a cad and scoundrel would claim such an honor falsely, and it is one thing in life I do not take lightly.”

“But Dupin was a fictional character!” I cried. “Everyone knows this.”

“Do they?”

“Sherlock Holmes and I have discussed Dupin on many occasions, as each of us had read the fiction in which that character appears.” I recalled quite vividly the conversation I had with Holmes on this very topic when we first met. When I observed that his methods called to mind Poe’s Dupin, Holmes said, with some asperity, ‘No doubt you think you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin. Now in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. 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. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.’

I did not recount my friend’s words, but instead restated that Auguste Dupin was conjured entirely from the imagination of a writer of fiction and had no other reality.

“Is Holmes an equally literary phantom?” countered the old man.

“Holmes is—was—a real person and I had the very great honor to serve as his biographer,” I said indignantly. “Or at least I attempted to do so, though I admit to my own shortcomings as a writer.”

“No,” he said, “you are quite an acceptable writer, although I will go as far as to say that it is clear you do not fully grasp the subtleties of either the deductive or inductive process of observation, analysis, and assessment. For my part, however, I was briefly acquainted with M. Poe when I was much younger, though he was more closely associated with a dear friend of mine. I fear my friend—who bears some great similarities to you, I will admit—was wont to share intimacies. Drink, you know. A fine fellow in his way, but he had no head for wine. Not after the second bottle. He and Poe beguiled many an evening in salons, and it was there, I learned later, that my friend shared the details of some . . . er, matters . . . with which I was involved.”

“You mean the matter of the stolen letter, the grotesque situation with the ape, and the woman found floating in the river?” I said, and I could feel my anger transforming by slow degrees into astonishment, even fascination.

“Indeed,” said Dupin—for now I was coming to think of him as that person in truth. “Though if you have read those fictions—I cannot in truth credit them as objective accounts—then you will be aware that M. Poe tended to embellish in favor of hyperbole and dramatic flair. He could not be chased away from superlatives, the scoundrel. He would err on the side of style—God help us—when a cold, unemphatic statement of the bare facts would have been both more accurate and more exciting to the intellectual mind.”