Émile Gaboriau
Gaboriau, Émile (1832-73). Secretary to the novelist Paul Féval, and journalist, Gaboriau began detective fiction in French by creating the first detectives; his admiration for Poe was an obvious influence. L'Affaire Lerouge (1866, but serialized in 1863) presents le père Tabaret, significantly nicknamed ‘Tire-au-clair’, and Inspecteur Lecoq, in a mystery to be solved logically and scientifically. Gaboriau also wrote Le Crime d'Orcival (1867), Le Dossier 113 (1867), Les Esclaves de Paris (1869), Monsieur Lecoq (1869), La Vie infernale (1870), La Clique dorée (1871), La Dégringolade (1873), La Corde au cou (1873). The later novels feature Lecoq, master of disguise and deduction alike. The crimes are presented as problems to be solved by observation and analysis, but Gaboriau's villains use misleading clues and false trails, so that solving the crime becomes a duel between villain and detective, and also between the author and the reader, whom he deliberately sets out to baffle and amaze. Detective fiction was not, however, sufficently established and recognized as a genre for the detective's enquiries to constitute the sole interest, and Gaboriau's novels still retain, alongside the astute deductions, the melodramatic devices of the roman-feuilleton.
[Stephen Noreiko]
