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Émile Gaboriau (1832-1873) | |
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French 19th century mystery writer, novelist, and journalist, one of the pioneers of the modern roman policier. Gaboriau's first book of the genre, L'Affaire Lerouge (1866) introduced an amateur detective, who works logically. In the same book appeared also a young policeman named Lecoq, the hero in three of Gaboriau's detective novels. Lecoq was based on a real-life thief turned a police, François Vidocq (1775-1857), whose memoirs, Les Vrais Mémoires de Vidocq, mixed fiction and fact. In his own time Gaboriau gained a huge popularity, but when Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, Lecoq's international fame declined. "When I examined the lawn," pursued M. Lecoq, "I found the parallel trails of the feet, but yet the grass was crushed over a rather wide space. How was that? Because it was the body, not of a man, but of a woman, which was dragged across the lawn - of a woman full-dressed, with heavy petticoats; that, in short, of the countess, and not of the count." (from The Mystery of Orcival, 1867) Émile Gaboriau was born in the small town of Saujon, Charente-Martime, the son of Charles-Gabriel Gaboriau, a minor public official, and Marguerite-Stéphanie Gaboriau (née Magistrel). The family moved in 1833 to Saint-Pierre d'Oleron and four years later to La Rochelle, where Émile's sister, Amélie, was born. Gaboriau studied in Tarasconsur-Rhône at the community secondary school, where he met Alphonse Millaud, whose uncle later published in his daily, Le Soleil, Gaboriau's novels in serialized form. After studies at a secondary school in Saumur, he entered the military service in 1851, serving in the Fifth Regiment as a second-class infantryman until the end of 1853. Perhaps following his father's wishes, he apprenticed himself to a notary. However, Gaboriau was more interested in writing, and he published a volume of poetry that went unnoticed. After settling in Paris in 1856, Gaboriau worked as a journalist, writing columns for the short-lived weekly journal La Vérité. He became a secretary, assistant, and ghost writer to Paul Féval, a newspaper editor, dramatist, and author of criminal romances for feuilletons, serial leaflets of French daily newspapers. For his stories Gaboriau gathered material in police courts, morgues, and prisons. In the early 1860s Gaboriau published his first books, but it was not until L'Affaire Lerouge when he started to gain success. His works were translated into English, German, and Italian. In Japan Gaboriau enjoyed great popularity in Ruiko Kuriowa's translations. During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 Gaboriau was in Paris. He married in 1873 Amélie Rogelet, who had been his companion of eleven years, but the marriage ended abruptly. Gaboriau died of pulmonary apoplexy on 28 September, 1873. His last detective character was Goudar. He saves an innocent man from a sentence of twenty years of hard labor in La Corde au cou (1873). The protagonist of the story is M. Galpin, a magistrate. Lecoq model, Vidocq began as a criminal during the times of the French Revolution. He spent much time is prison, escaped, turned informed and eventually became Chef de la Sûrete, who boasted: "It always astonished people reporting a theft, for example, that, given some detail which seemed insignificant to them, I could reconstruct the entire crime, or say: 'That man is the criminal.'" Self-confidence was also one of Lecoq personal traits. In his youth Lecoq was forced to take menial jobs to continue his legal studied. There are shady spots in his past, but after joining the Sûrete he becomes its best detective, a master of disguise, and developer of the method of using plaster to make impressions of footprints. "I know the goings on in your establishment. It isn't always to talk about dress that ladies stop at your place on returning from the Bois. You sell silks and satins no doubt; but you sell Madeira, and excellent cigarettes as well, and there are some who don't walk very straight on leaving your establishment, but smell suspiciously of tobacco and absinthe. Oh, yes, let us go to law, by all means! I shall have an advocate who will know how to explain the parts your customers pay, and who will reveal how, with your assistance, they obtain money from other sources than their husband's cash-box." (from Baron Trigault's Vengeance, 1870) Gaboriau emphasized more the work of detection, gathering and interpreting of evidence, than the crime or the criminal. He knew the work of Edgar Allan Poe, considering himself as a discipline of the American writer. Like Poe's hero the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, Lecoq was a sharp analyst, and he could astonish his companions with his skills. As a detective Lecoq matched Holmes in interpreting the meaning of small details. Lecoq has only to look at the snow-covered ground outside an inn to describe the man who passed by half an hour earlier – he is middle-aged, very tall, wears a shaggy overcoat and is married. This did not prevent Sherlock Holmes from describing his French rival as "a miserable bungler" in A Study in Scarlet (1886) "...he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill," Holmes mocked Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1869). Doyle himself was impressed by the work of Gaboriau, writing in Memories and Adventures (1924), "Gaboriau had rather attracted me by the neat dovetailing of his plots." Lecoq's companion in solving crimes, Pére Tabaret, formerly a pawnbroker's clerk, was the central character in L'Affaire Lerouge, in which Lecoq made only a cameo appearance. It was first published in installments in Le Pays in 1865, and then reprinted in Le Soleil in 1866. The story involved family secrets, illegitimate children, aristocrats, and murder. Lecoq had the central role in Le crime d'Orcival (1867), in which the dead body of the charming Countess de Tremorel prompts a murder investigation, Le dossier no. 113 (1867), a story of a bank robbery and false identities, and Monsieur Lecoq. Gaboriau also published melodramatic mystery stories, historical studies, biographies of famous actresses, and novels examining contemporary way of life in the footsteps of Balzac's La Comédie humaine. For further reading: Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, and Their Prototypes by Friedrich Depken (1949); The Murder Book by Tage la Cour and Harald Mogensen (1971); The Life and Works of Émile Gaboriau by Nancy L. Curry (1979); And Always a Detective by R.F. Stewart (1980); Émile Gaboriau ou la naissance du roman policier by Roger Bonniot (1985); 'Gaboriau, Émile' by E.F. Bleiler, in St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996); 'Émile Gaboriau' by Walter Albert, in Mystery & Suspense Writers, vol. 1, ed. by Robin W. Winks (1998) - For further information: Émile Gaboriau - Selected works:
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