This is by Emile Gaboriau (1832-73). Born a little south of La Rochelle, he had a career that embraced ghostwriting and journalism, but he's remembered as a novelist, and in particular as a pioneer in detective fiction.

I heard of him via Marie Belloc Lowndes and The Lodger. At the height of the "Avenger" murder series featured in that book, a letter appears in the newspaper, making suggestions about the case. It is signed "Gaboriyou". Joe, the policeman, tells the landlord and landlady: "That's the name of a French chap what wrote detective stories... Pretty good, some of them are, too!" His listeners are all excited, but Joe explains the letter-writer was probably using a pseudonym (which might explain why the name is spelled wrongly).


Emile Gaboriau

The Lerouge Case (L'affaire Lerouge) is his first detective novel. I read it in French, but an English translation exists, entitled The Widow Lerouge (which I think is a bit ridiculous as it turns out in the course of the story that she wasn't a widow).

There's a long-running argument about the status of this book. Was Gaboriau in fact "the first person to write about fictional detectives in novel-length form?" There was Edgar Allan Poe, of course, and he influenced Gaboriau, but Poe's Paris cases (the first appeared in 1841) were shorter pieces. Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, on the other hand, was a novel, but wasn't published until 1868, two years after this one.

Jean-Louis Tilleuil claims that The Lerouge Case was the novel that began to harness deductive reasoning to the solving of a criminal case. But he goes on to say it's more accurate to see The Lerouge Case as occupying a median position between Poe's three novellas and the first exploits of Sherlock Holmes.

An informative introduction to the Editions de Londres publication also prefers to see this book as "one of the first" detective novels. The opening pages describe the finding of a body, the scene of the crime, hypotheses, and deductive methods. But then we move into long digressions by means of flashbacks. These are more akin to Balzac -- who might also be a crime novel precursor with A Murky Business (Une tenebreuse affaire). So we're half-way, says this commentator, between a crime novel and something Balzacian.

Andre Vanoncini also notes Balzacian elements, and concludes with a very interesting point: "The Lerouge Case is the first novel to synchronize, then to juxtapose, two contradictory logics: That of the judicial system, which aims to discover and arrest a criminal, and that of the romantic, even fanciful, hero, who believes he is reaching an ideal by seeking to conquer his place at the top of the established social order. Gaboriau constantly interweaves the registers specific to each of these quests."

That's very perceptive, I think, because it explains the slight oddity that this book offers.

On the one hand, it is classic crime. The action is set in 1862. A woman called Claudine Lerouge is murdered in a village on the outskirts of Paris. She has lived there for two years, arriving apparently from nowhere. And she doesn't have an especially good reputation.

The big guns arrive from Paris:

1. M. Daburon, who has been an investigating judge since 1859. Brilliant reputation. Rigorous. Principled. Cautious.

2. M. Gevrol, police chief. Obstinate. Brilliant memory for faces, and tenacious, but hard to budge from an initial assumption. We recognize the type all these years later.

3. Lecoq, Gevrol's adjutant. A former offender now reconciled to the law. Smart. Jealous of his boss, whom he judges to be mediocre. Lecoq is missing for most of the action, appearing again only in Chapter 18. But he later -- or so I'm told -- becomes the lead detective in several more of Gaboriau's novels.

4. M. Tabaret (nicknamed Tirauclair on account of his ability to bring things to light). Lecoq is a great admirer of this unconventional personage, who solves police cases as a hobby (having exhausted his obsession with old books). Lecoq is the one who suggests drafting him in, despite the dislike he obviously inspires in Gevrol. Tabaret is a character. A keen observer, he picks up and interprets lots of tiny details that others have missed (in the way Sherlock Holmes later did). But he comes across as slightly unhinged. Bubbling with energy, he charges around, muttering to himself (which brings Colombo to mind in people of my vintage). Again, we see patterns that are long familiar to us, but must have been ground-breaking then: The amateur detective, the zany character, the awkward relationship with the "real" police.


Paris, 2019

This is all set up very well. And we have plenty of detection. Searches are made. Evidence is catalogued. Alibis are checked. Suspects are interrogated.

Also familiar from our modern crime-novel expectations is the emotional baggage of some of our investigators. The novel pivots around two half-brothers, Albert and Noel, one legitimate, one not (I won't say which is which, because that's the key question). M. Daburon rivalled one of them for a young lady's affections (and came off worse); M. Tabaret is friends with the other, and is even planning to leave him a hefty legacy. Both are therefore emotionally compromised.

The complexity of the plot, and its constant twists and turns, also lend The Lerouge Case the page-turning qualities we associate with a detective novel. When the apparently guilty party is arrested about a quarter of the way through, and a vast array of "proofs" are assembled against him, we modern readers are pretty clear he can't be the villain... It's just too early... And sure enough, there are plenty more revelations, with events happening under our noses in the present day, and yet more secrets being dragged out of the rotten woodwork of the past. I did spot the villain fairly early on, but certainly didn't predict all the machinations that brought him to the point of his villainy.

So, we have the swapping of babies (or not); the infidelity of mistresses (or not); conspiracies and counter-conspiracies; a last-minute deathbed revelation; the emergence of someone supposed to be dead; and the suicide of the guilty party. We have that good old 19th-century stalwart, brain-fever; we have medical emergencies involving mustard plasters and leeches... You can't complain there's nothing happening.

On the other hand, we keep leaving the manhunt to fill in the background, quite lengthily at times. These sections give the novel a kind of panoramic feel (hence the Balzacian comparison, I think, although it's a long while since I read any Balzac).

We have, for example, two examples of the nobility. The Marchioness of Arlange, "undoubtedly the most singular legacy left by the eighteenth century to ours", is one. She's stuck in the ancien regime: "Everything that has happened since the year 89 she considers non-existent. It's a nightmare, and she's waiting to wake up from it." She still believes the place of the nobility is firmly above the law. Then there's the Count of Commarin (he of the two sons): "Just as exclusive as the Marchioness of Arlange, he had nevertheless moved with the times, or at least he seemed to have moved. He absolutely despised everything that was not noble, just as much as the Marchioness did, but his contempt was expressed in a different way... To put it bluntly, the count was the flattering portrait of a certain section of society, and the marchioness was its caricature."

Adding to the tableau, we have an unscrupulous moneylender, an utterly cynical and parasitic mistress, a convention-defying woman out for gain and good times, and a ballet of loquacious servants who comment on the characters like a Greek chorus.

I shouldn't forget to add that Gaboriau is also quite humorous. His descriptions are often droll, and the quirks of Constant, M. Daburon's clerk, are often amusing. Examples: "Constant made that grimace which, on his lips, indicates that hilarity is reaching its paroxysm... Constant, the serious, impassive, immovable, deaf-mute Constant, stood up and spoke. He broke a silence of 15 years, forgetting himself to the point of expressing an opinion. He said: 'This, sir, is a surprising business.'"



There's lots about judicial procedure that's quite interesting, given the date of writing.

On juries, for example: "Where magistrates would condemn, twenty times to one, with their conscience completely secure -- and rightly so, it must be said -- a jury acquits because the evidence isn't there... Each juror, at the moment of entering the deliberation room, thinks infinitely less of what he has just heard than he does of the risk he runs of preparing for nights of eternal remorse."

Then there's the impossibility of doing things at the right speed. On the one hand: "Justice is accused of slowness, but it is this very slowness that gives it its strength and its certainty, and makes it almost infallible." On the other: "Today, when justice hesitates, a huge waste of time and money is required, just as it was twenty years ago, to obtain the slightest information. It takes a massive effort, in many cases, to obtain the civil status of a witness or a defendant. On Friday, during the daytime, we had written to ask for Claudine's file; it was now Monday, and the response had not arrived. And yet we have photography, we have the electric telegraph, we have a thousand formerly unknown means at our disposal. We just do not use them."

And this could have been written today: "Explain if you can the following frequently occurring phenomenon: A crime is committed, justice arrives on the scene surrounded by mystery, the police still know hardly anything, and yet details of the utmost accuracy are already circulating through the streets."

It's interesting, too, for the way in which our investigators actually evolve, quite tragically in some ways. That premature arrest -- the one we all knew was going to cause problems -- brings two of our investigators to a turning-point.

M. Daburon reproaches himself for jumping the gun, and for not recusing himself. He is conscious that only chance saved him from overseeing a terrible miscarriage of justice, and now feels an invincible horror for his profession. At the end, he resigns, and moves to Poitou.

Tabaret is even more gutted. When he realizes that they have arrested the wrong man, and the diabolically accurate chain of evidence is going to make it hard to get him out, he's horrified. He's ashamed that he formerly gloried in his exploits, and his subtlety, and his acumen. Eventually, he ends up acknowledging the astuteness of Gevrol, when the latter finds the key witness who reveals all. The novel concludes: "After having believed in the infallibility of justice, he sees only judicial errors everywhere... He signed petitions for the abolition of the death penalty, and set up a society that aimed to aid poor and innocent defendants."

***

Gaboriau influenced Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). In A Talk (1892), the British author says: "The best detective in fiction is Edgar Allan Poe's Monsieur Dupin; then Monsieur Le Cocq [sic], Gaboriau's hero." Which doesn't stop Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet (1887), characteristically dissing the French detective: "Have you read Gaboriau's works? Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective? Lecoq was a miserable bungler... That book made me positively ill... It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid."

But Andre Gide says Gaboriau was the real deal, an extraordinary pioneer, and Conan Doyle's detective stories are small beer next to his... So there.

Via Conan Doyle, Gaboriau influenced Gaston Leroux, Maurice Leblanc, Agatha Christie, Jean Ray, and even Georges Simenon. A list of greats that is not to be sneezed at.

I will definitely take on another one, if only to find out what Lecoq amounts to.