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by rramadass·7y ago·view on hn ↗
This is a must read story.

The exact same code was copied by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Dancing men". He just substituted the symbols in the code with different ones.

Arthur Conan Doyle himself acknowledged Edgar Allan Poe's influence in his creation of Sherlock Holmes. So fans of detective fiction should absolutely read the three stories featuring Poe's hero Auguste Dupin;

1) The Murders in The Rue Morgue.

2) The Mystery of Marie Roget (supposedly based on a true story).

3) The Purloined letter.

(1) and (2) in particular have fantastic chains of reasoning which is just delightful.

1 comments
Not only did Doyle acknowledge Poe. Holmes himself scoffed at the (in his universe) fictional Dupin, and demonstrated on several occasions similar lines of reasoning (e.g., determining what Watson was thinking about after long silences).
Doyle had a poetic exchange with a critic who tried to call him out on Sherlock Holmes’s scoffing at Dupin when it was well known that Holmes was partly based on Dupin. Doyle’s riposte:

    Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
    'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
    Here is a critic who says as a platitude
    That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
    Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
    Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
    Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
    That the created is not the creator?
    As the creator I've praised to satiety
    Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
    And have admitted that in my detective work
    I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
    But is it not on the verge of inanity
    To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
    He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
    Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
    So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
    The doll and its maker are never identical.
https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/To_An_Undiscern...
I knew of this! :-)

The above and more can be found in "The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes" compiled by Richard Lancelyn Green - https://www.amazon.com/Uncollected-Sherlock-Holmes-Arthur-Co... (get a used copy).

Poe of course also has a big influence on modern horror such as H.P. Lovecraft. But I always found Poe's stories a bit more disturbing than modern ones: they are told from the point of view of the murderer.