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From: JAFFE@RUTGERS.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Sherlock Holmes Stories
Message-ID: <2547@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 8-Jul-85 16:37:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.2547
Posted: Mon Jul  8 16:37:31 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 9-Jul-85 07:29:45 EDT
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: watmath!jagardner (Jim Gardner)

In article <441@busch.UUCP> mte@busch.UUCP (Moshe Eliovson) writes:
>	While I realize Doyle wasn't a plagiarist I was grossly disappointed
>when I read an Edgar Allen Poe story that was a forerunner of the detective
>genre of stories of that period.  The story was almost identical to a Sherlock
>Holmes story except that the flow of logic, facts and setting had been changed.

For those who like tracing these things down, check out "Zadig", a
novella-length story by Voltaire (about 100 years before Poe).  Zadig
is a Babylonian nobleman who uses VERY Sherlockian chains of reasoning
in one or two places.  It gets him into trouble too.  Example: he is
out walking when armed men appear looking for a missing hunting dog.
They ask if Zadig has seen the dog.  Zadig (observing various marks
on the trail) says something along the lines of, "So you're looking
for an elderly female, who has recently had a litter of pups, has a
bad right leg and drools quite a bit?  Haven't seen her."  I have seen
Voltaire cited as the great-grandfather of the detective novel for
precisely this reason.

				Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo