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
Louis Ellies Dupin otherwise they are credited with a moral steadfastness which elicits sympathy and leads to their being excused". Dupin submitted, but was nevertheless condemned by the Archbishop of Paris (14 April 1696). Dupin continued his "Bibliothèque", which was put on the "Index" long after his death (10 May 1757), though other works of his were condemned at an earlier date. He was also criticized by Richard Simon, though the two had similar views and employed similar methods so that when Bossuet was writing the "Défense de la Tradition et des Saints Pères" (which did not appear, however, until 1743), he included