The name Sherlock Holmes is nearly synonymous with the word detective for many people due to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's vastly popular ratiocinative detective stories. However, Edgar Allan Poe is considered the author of the first ratiocinative or classical detective story in the 1840s. Poe introduced and Doyle masterfully articulated the classical detective formula while writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers continued the classical tradition well into the twentieth century (Cawelti 80).