Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843) | Hacker News Reader

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843)

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65 pointsbenbreen13 comments

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.

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.

This is the first book I ever bought. I've never been much of a reader, but when I was a teenager, I had 10 Francs to spend (= $1.50) and bought this edition [1] (which also included "The Purloined letter") on a whim, mainly because the story was short.

It took me a few months to actually start reading this book. I was quite fascinated by how analytical the story turned out to be. I guess it suited my more rational mind. I was also surprised that these types of stories actually existed, less focused on characters and the dramatisation of everyday events, more on drawing logical conclusions from real-life puzzles.

As it turns out, this book, first translated by Charles Baudelaire, reached cult-status here in France.

[1]: https://www.abebooks.com/9782277300939/scarab%C3%A9e-dor-Edg...

I have a tiny copy of this story from the 1910s. It’s 3” wide and 4” long. I think it was a fad where people were reading more but didn’t want to carry around a bulky book. Or maybe for WWI soldiers.

Photo: https://i.imgur.com/Fz5odhx.jpg

Sounds like a predecessor to Big Little Books

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Little_Book_series

which only started publishing in the 1930s.

Wow, totally forgot I wrote a text adventure game based on "The Gold Bug" on the family Radio Shack Color Computer in high school. Those bits are surely gone in the wind now.

And the accompanying Alan Parsons Project song, inspired by the story: https://song.link/i/278775202

Sullivan's Island has some tribute to Poe today: Raven Drive, Goldbug Ave, plus Poe's Tavern. I found this out while visiting Charleston, and had forgotten about the Gold Bug connection.

See also “Solution of Tyler's Cryptograms Published in Poe's Article”

http://cryptiana.web.fc2.com/code/poe2.htm

and “Cipher Solved, But Mystery Remains.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20120824222113/http://www.bokler...

The Gold-Bug also plays a critical role in the Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman. The audiobook series kept my kids (and myself) entertained for a good amount of family trips last year.

https://thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com/2017/0...

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