Hercule Poirot and Frank Howel Evans' Monsieur Poiret, a retired Belgian police officer living in London. A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In "An Autobiography", Christie states, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". For his part, Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of "ratiocination" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his
Charles Dupin Charles Dupin Baron Pierre Charles François Dupin (6 October 1784, Varzy, Nièvre – 18 January 1873, Paris, France) was a French Catholic mathematician, engineer, economist and politician, particularly known for work in the field of mathematics, where the Dupin cyclide and Dupin indicatrix are named after him; and for his work in the field of statistical and thematic mapping, In 1826 he created the earliest known choropleth map. He was born in Varzy in France, the son of Charles Andre Dupin, a lawyer, and Catherine Agnes Dupin. He studied geometry with Monge at the École Polytechnique and then became a