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Gaboriau, Emile

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 5 months ago
Émile Gaboriau (November 9, 1832 - September 28, 1873), was a French writer, novelist, and journalist, and a pioneer of modern detective fiction.

He was born in the small town of Saujon, Charente-Martime.

 

He became a secretary to Paul Féval, and after publishing some novels and miscellaneous writings, found his real gift in L'Affaire Lerouge (1866). The book, which was Gaboriau's first detective novel, introduced an amateur detective. It also introduced a young policeman named Lecoq, who was the hero in three of Gaboriau's later detective novels. Lecoq was based on a real-life thief turned policeman, François Vidocq (1775-1857), whose memoirs, Les Vrais Mémoires de Vidocq, mixed fiction and fact. The book was published in the Pays and at once made his reputation. The story was produced on the stage in 1872.

 

A long series of novels dealing with the annals of the police court followed, and proved very popular. Gaboriau gained a huge following, but when Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, Lecoq's international fame declined.

 

Gaboriau died in Paris of pulmonary apoplexy on the 28th of September 1873.

 

Many of Gaboriau's works, including some in French, are available from Project Gutenberg.


Mike Grost on Emile Gaboriau

 

Monsieur Lecoq

 

Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868) is so clearly a detective novel in the modern sense that it takes one's breath away. Here is clearly a major point of coalescence of the genre. The best chapters in the book are the early ones, dealing with the initial investigation of the crime, especially the elaborate detection in Chapter 3. Also notable is the map of the crime scene in Chapter 5, something that becomes omnipresent in later authors. Some surprising twists in the police interrogation are shown to be the result of some subtle misdirection at the end of the book; this sort of deeply hidden plot spring anticipates the work of Ellery Queen. However, Gaboriau hardly has a full puzzle plot in the conventional modern sense. There is a crime scene, which Lecoq's excellent detection in these early chapters elucidates, reconstructing most of the events that happened at that scene before and after the murder. Who the people at the crime scene were, or what caused them to act the way they did, is left as mystery: Gaboriau sums up all these unsolved mysteries explicitly in Chapter 6, concluding the early chapters of the book. Then, at the end of the book, a flashback shows the motivations and identities of the people at the crime scene, and that is that. There is no "fair play" in the modern sense; that is, with the evidence presented in the story, no one could deduce those identities or motivations. They just grow out of the elaborate "historical novel" in the second half of the book.

 

Gaboriau's Influence on Anna Katharine Green

 

The American writer Anna Katharine Green, who was influenced by Gaboriau, includes this sort of historical novel too, in books like The Circular Study (1900); to modern readers it is annoying, but it is simply a Nineteenth Century convention one has to live with. The passionate, complex family feuds of Monsieur Lecoq which stretch across generations, also turn up in the historical novel section of Green's The Circular Study. Green's plots in these historical sections are at least as complex and melodramatic as Gaboriau's.

 

The way menials get greedy ideas of their own, and gum up the elaborate criminal schemes of the rich characters, plays a role in both the crime solution of Monsieur Lecoq, and of such Green novels as The House of the Whispering Pines (1910). Even the crime settings of the two authors are similar: both like lonely rendezvous at out of the way places, filled with a spooky, sinister atmosphere. Often characters come to these places, filled with elaborate, illicit schemes. These rendezvous get out of hand, and murder ensues. There are plenty of clues left behind at the scene, and the detectives have to reconstruct the action on the night of the murder. And, yes, the killing often takes place at night, in both writers.

 

In both Monsieur Lecoq and Green there is far more emphasis on detection than on puzzle. There was indeed a tradition of puzzle plots in the Nineteenth Century; it is found in the romantic writers Hoffmann, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, with the latter's "Benito Cereno" (1855) being especially brilliantly constructed. Wilkie Collins also used puzzle plots, at least in The Moonstone and The Haunted Hotel. In Monsieur Lecoq and Green, the focus is instead on detectives and detection.

 

The focus on detection logically implies some aspects of their books' content. Both writers' detectives are supremely well characterized. Not only Lecoq, but all the other police detectives and magistrates in Le Crime d'Orcival and Monsieur Lecoq come off as real people. Gaboriau is at least as interested in portraying these people as characters, as he is in describing the suspects. Gaboriau is also deeply interested in "police procedure". Gaboriau's careful handling of real police procedure gives him claim to be an early exponent of the police procedural school of writing; later his well researched use of French legal proceedings will be echoed by Green's equally careful look at American legal activities in her The Leavenworth Case - Green was the daughter of a lawyer, and learned much about this from her father. Both authors' works will in fact be used as unofficial textbooks on their countries' police procedure. One suspects that an inside look at the police and law courts of the day, was a big selling point of the novels with the public of the period.

 

It is easy to see both similarities and differences between Gaboriau and Green. Green, like most later 19th Century mystery writers, is highly indebted to Gaboriau. But she also innovates with her use of detection, peeling off layer after layer of buried past reality, making hidden aspects of the plot gradually emerge. This use of detection to gradually unveil complex situations is her biggest accomplishment as a detective story writer; she does it with excellent logic and plot construction. Gaboriau does not do this, at least in Monsieur Lecoq; most of his detection is limited to the opening chapters, and comes all at once, revealing everything he will learn about the case in nearly a single fell swoop. By contrast, the best sections in many Green novels are the middle chapters of the story, in which detection unfolds more and more of the mysterious past. In Gaboriau's Le Crime d'Orcival (1866), there is more unveiling of buried past secrets, but it still does not approach the elaborate and systematic quality of Green.

 

Gaboriau's portrait in Monsieur Lecoq (1868) of an inexperienced but brilliant young detective on his first case probably also influenced Green as well. Towards the end of the 1890's Green started creating some new detectives. Miss Amelia Butterworth had already appeared in two novels when she created Sweetwater in Agatha Webb (1899). Caleb Sweetwater begins as a young man hoping to get his first job as a detective. When a murder occurs in his small hometown, he wangles a minor job as an investigator, with the local Constable. Sweetwater is neither an amateur or a professional, Green's two categories in The Leavenworth Case, but functions instead as an inexperienced, aspiring professional. Later he will become an assistant to Ebenezer Gryce, serving as a full fledged professional detective, as well as getting further cases on his own, such as The House of the Whispering Pines (1910). In his debut work Sweetwater proves more brilliant than the experienced detective brought in from Boston to solve the case. The two detectives become rivals. Green's literary model here is clearly Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868), and the young Lecoq's rivalry with the established detective Inspector Gevrol in that novel. Like the young Lecoq on his first major case in that book, Sweetwater is a bundle of detectival energy. There is also a Gaboriau like emphasis on examining murder scenes, and making deductions from them. However, Green is nowhere as clever as Gaboriau in recreating crimes from physical evidence. As a whole Agatha Webb is strictly one of her most minor novels.

 

Gaboriau and Casebook Literature

 

On reading this literature, much of which flourished in the decade before Gaboriau, it is hard to believe that he was not familiar with some of it, at least "Waters" and others. This was discussed in more detail in the article on Casebook Literature.

 

The summing up of unsolved mysteries in Chapter 6 of Monsieur Lecoq is what Carolyn Wells called a tabulation (in her Technique of the Mystery Story). She cites examples from Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), and later ones from Green. The technique is used with systematic elaborateness by Green, and one suspects that from her it passed on to modern writers of mystery fiction, such as Christie, Rinehart, and Van Dine, all of whom are on record as having read Green, and all of whom use the technique. Before Gaboriau, it was used by the British Casebook writer Andrew Forrester, Jr., in "The Unknown Weapon". Forrester provides both tabulations of unsolved mysteries, and later lists of known deductions.

 

Casebook school founder "Waters" carefully dated events in his tales; the killing in his "Murder Under the Microscope", takes place on September 30, 1845. Forrester, Gaboriau and later Anna Katherine Green also followed this practice.

 

Later Influence of Gaboriau

 

Gaboriau was still having a direct influence on writers in the days leading up to the first World War, thirty-five years after his death. Lecoq follows real trails of evidence in the early chapters of Monsieur Lecoq, then unwittingly follows false trails of faked evidence left by the murderer and his accomplice in later chapters of the book. Both kinds of detection are widely used by later writers of the Freeman - Crofts school of realism. Gaboriau's precise dating of events will also be common in Freeman. There is also the production of books set in Paris by Anglo-American writers, that seem directly inspired by Gaboriau's roman policiers. For example, Cleveland Moffett's Through the Wall (1909) stars a French police detective, like Lecoq, who has a long duel with a villainous, disguised nobleman, just like the villain of Monsieur Lecoq. The arrogance, cleverness, and seeming omnipotence of the nobleman in Moffett seems inspired by the villain in Monsieur Lecoq. Arthur Griffiths' The Rome Express (1896) also largely takes place in Paris, and includes a detailed scene set at the Paris Morgue, which seems like a direct imitation of the one in Monsieur Lecoq. The zany, surrealistic Tictoq parodies of O. Henry also come to mind here. These burlesques from 1893 -1894 seem to lampoon not so much the Lecoq stories themselves, but "French" novels by English language writers, full of phony French atmosphere, Parisian aristocratic high life, and untranslated French phrases. These demented works are some of O. Henry's most bizarre creations, written with full surrealistic abandon.

 

One even wonders if there was a direct influence of Gaboriau on the pioneer writer of pulp magazine police procedurals, [Kantor, MacKinlay|MacKinlay Kantor]. His "The Trail of the Brown Sedan" (1933) largely deals with police tracking suspects, just as in Gaboriau. His young policeman, Nick Glennan, is an officer on the rise, just like the youthful hero of Monsieur Lecoq. Gaboriau's remarkable flair for recreating urban landscapes, especially open spaces and waste regions, also is echoed by a similar flair for landscape in Kantor. So are the lonely nocturnal settings: compare Monsieur Lecoq and Kantor's "The Second Challenge" (1929). There is also the Gaboriau-like sense of ordinary people dealing with very powerful villains in Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (1930). Kantor's work has the "feel" of Gaboriau, and one wonders if Kantor read him as a child.

 

Even before Kantor, there are signs that the Gaboriau tradition of police fiction survived in the American pulps. Johnston McCulley, best known as the creator of Zorro, was a regular contributor to Street & Smith's Detective Story, the pioneer mystery pulp magazine. His series about Noggins, a homicide detective, written under his pseudonym Harrington Strong, also seems to be in the tradition of Émile Gaboriau. As in Gaboriau, Noggins does a lot of shadowing of suspects. And as in Gaboriau, there is rivalry among different police officers. The villain also tries to deliberately confuse the police, as do Gaboriau's. There is also an emphasis on respectability versus a criminal lifestyle that recalls the French author, with the villain having a foot in both camps. The middle aged, mild mannered Noggins, who looks like a bookkeeper, also recalls middle class looking detectives in such Gaboriau tales as "Le Petit Vieux de Batignolles". While the storytelling in "Noggin's Souvenir" (1920) is competent, the plotting and detective craftsmanship are weak. Noggins' detections rely heavily on coincidence. There is a puzzle plot, but it should not stump most modern readers. Disguise plays a role here; veritably, it is Gaboriau reborn.

 

Gaboriau's Short Stories

 

In Gaboriau's "Une Disparition", ("A Disappearance"), written perhaps in 1870, police officers track a businessman who disappeared, with the same enthusiasm and skill they tracked murder suspects in Monsieur Lecoq. This story also shows the same mentor relationships among the Paris police as the novel did: there Lecoq gets straightened out at the end by consulting Tirauclair; here the hero is similarly set right at the end by consulting Lecoq. This little tale does not greatly extend the detective technique of the novel, but it does take us into a more middle class world than the book, where all the suspects were either noblemen or lowlifes. So does "Le Petit Vieux des Batignoles" (1870), ("The Little Old Man of Batignoles"), Gaboriau's other main detective short story. This tale does have a puzzle plot. Gaboriau leads his readers into an intricate maze where nothing is as it seems. Every clue or apparent deduction is immediately contradicted by something else, and the detectives find it hard to come up with any theory that explains all the facts. This sort of "overload" approach will later be used by Baroness Orczy. There is also a "paradoxical" feel to the tale; Gaboriau takes delight in each clue pointing to its apparent direct opposite. Gaboriau also shows how a clue can be interpreted in many different ways. The scenes early in the story, where the young doctor narrator meets the policeman M. Mechinet, and is invited by him to join him on a murder case, seem directly anticipatory of Dr. Watson's meeting of Sherlock Holmes. Behind both Gaboriau and Doyle stand Edgar Allan Poe, and the meeting of the narrator and Dupin in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841).

 

The 1860's French Police

 

The introductory crime scenes in Gaboriau are followed by more investigative material, and this subsequent section tends to include a biography of the principal detective, and a history of how he became a policeman. In Tirauclair's case, he was an avid reader and collector of police non-fiction, eventually building up one of the largest libraries in France on this topic. This seems semi-autobiographical, because Gaboriau himself was a collector of such police memoirs and literature, according to E.F. Bleiler's introduction to Monsieur Lecoq.

 

I am beginning to understand the French police world better, after reading a lot of Gaboriau. The books are consistent with each other, but each also has its own emphasis and revelations of different perspectives. Some points: today's police forces are organized on a semi-military basis. Joining them involves being inducted into a force, and involves a full initiation ritual, which marks a clear line of demarcation between the police corps and the outside world. The new policeman even wears a uniform, marking his new identity, although later he can revert to civilian clothes.

 

None of this was apparently true in Gaboriau's day, at least in fiction. Then the police were a collection of semiautonomous agents, each of which worked both for the police and for themselves. These policemen could take on private cases in their spare time. Tirauclair in Lerouge is a middle aged amateur, a well to do retiree who is fascinated by police work and who joins the force as an agent. He finances many of his investigations out of his own pocket, and is more or less a law unto himself, seeming to report to no one on the force. Tirauclair is as much an amateur detective as a professional; someone who is both within and without the world of the police.

 

Even odder by today's standards is the depiction of Lecoq in this novel as an ex-criminal "who had been reconciled to the police" and who became a policeman. This makes it sound as if police work were viewed as a private duel between cops and criminals, and one where a player could casually change sides! No police force today would accept such a switch at all, but in Gaboriau's day, such men were apparently valued for their understanding of the world of the criminal. (The later Gaboriau novels with Lecoq as their principal hero, such as Le Crime d'Orcival and Monsieur Lecoq, eliminate this reference to Lecoq's criminal past, giving him a respectable life of hard work and struggle, instead.)

 

Secondly, the police were looked down upon by the public in 1860's France, and the police often took steps to conceal their identities. This takes on a number of amusing variations in Gaboriau's fiction, and I do not want to spoil the reader's fun by revealing all here. But it does explain something I found puzzling when I first started reading Gaboriau, and that is the common use of nicknames by the police. It is used partly to conceal their identities. It is made clear in Lerouge that the detective uses the name Tirauclair while investigating, but is known to his neighbors in his private life under his real name, Pere Tabaret. They are unaware that he works for the police, and regard him as just another bourgeois. This seems to be a common pattern in Gaboriau's world. It is a bit like CIA agents today: their neighbors all think that they are bankers or something and are unaware of their ties to the Agency.

 

Many of the detectives in Gaboriau seem to have a police name, in addition to their real name. While helping to conceal their identity, it also seems to be a macho ritual, like the new names the Navy pilots have in Top Gun (1986). Just as Tom Cruise was Maverick in that film, so do Gaboriau's police have meaningful new names. Tirauclair means "draw to light", and refers to his ability to extract the truth from mysterious situations. One is also reminded of Romantic era poets, and their adoption of "Poetry names" to refer to themselves in their new identities as poets. These names were usually writers of ancient Greece: for example, Coleridge referred to himself as Alcaeus in his poems. In Japan writers also took on new names when they became poets: "Basho", for example means "banana plant" (specifically the Japanese banana, Musa basoo.) Men just love to disguise themselves, and take on new identities. It's a guy thing.

 

Fathers and Sons

 

In Gaboriau, there is often a relationship between older men and younger men who function unofficially as their adoptive sons. In L'Affaire Lerouge, this goes sour; in Le Dossier No 113, it begins by being full of mutual suspicion at the start of the story, but gets resolved; and in "Le Petit Vieux des Batignoles" it is completely happy - so that Gaboriau's portrait of these relationships became progressively happier over time. In the two early novels, it is largely seen from the older man's point of view; in the short story, from the adopted son's. There is also the happy mentor relationship between young Lecoq and Tirauclair at the end of Monsieur Lecoq.

 

Recommended Reading

 

Roger Bonniot's massive biography and critical study Émile Gaboriau ou La Naissance du roman policier (1985) ("Émile Gaboriau or the Birth of the Mystery Novel") is available for those who read French. It also contains information on such Gaboriau contemporaries as Paul Féval and Fortuné Du Boisgobey. In English, E. F. Bleiler's Introduction to the Dover Edition (1975) of Monsieur Lecoq contains a great deal of biographical, and critical information on Gaboriau. It also has a complete bibliography.

 

Detective bibliography

 

L'Affaire Lerouge (1866)

Le Crime d'Orcival (1867) aka The Mystery of Orcival

Le Dossier 113 (1867) aka File No. 113; aka The Blackmailers

Monsieur Lecoq (1869)

La Vie infernale (1870)

Les Esclaves de Paris (1869)

La Corde au Cou (1872)

L'Argent des autres (1874)

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