In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes's methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.’ But Bell was not the only source for Holmes. His literary model was Edgar Allan Poe's ‘masterful’ Parisian detective, Le Chavalier C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), and reappeared in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Poe was one of the most powerful literary influences on Doyle's writing. In Through the Magic Door (1907), a memoir of his reading, Doyle praised Poe as ‘the supreme original short story writer of all time. His brain was like a seed-pod full of seeds which flew carelessly around, and from which have sprung nearly all our modern types of story’, including, of course, detective fiction. Each writer in the genre ‘may find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point’. When introducing Holmes to the world in A Study in Scarlet, Doyle acknowledged Poe's influence when Watson compares Holmes to Dupin, only to earn Holmes's retort: ‘No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin … Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow … he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine’ (21). This is a textually involved tribute, in that it appears to denigrate Dupin while alluding to Dupin's own repudiation of his real-life predecessor, the criminal-turned-investigator Eugène François Vidocq, a founder of the French Sûreté. In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Dupin described Vidocq as ‘a good guesser, and a persevering man.