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
C. Auguste Dupin deduces what his friend is thinking despite their having walked together in silence for a quarter of an hour, Holmes remarks: "That trick of his breaking in on his friend's thoughts with an apropos remark... is really very showy and superficial"; nevertheless, Holmes later performs the same 'trick' on Watson in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box". Dupin next appears in a series of seven short stories in "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" by Michael Harrison in the 1960s. The stories were collected by the Publishers Mycroft & Moran in 1968 as "The Exploits of Chevalier Dupin". The stories include "The