Gaboriau and Lecoq

 Arthur Conan Doyle, commenting on his own reading, once remarked, "I have read Gaboriau's 'Lecoq the Detective', 'The Gilded Clique', and a story concerning the murder of an old woman, the name of which I forget [it was 'The Widow LeRouge']. All very good. Wilkie Collins, but more so."

So before we leave the 19th Century for good, I'd like to reflect briefly on Emile Gaboriau (pictured below).

Police memoirs became popular reading from the 1820s onwards. I previously discussed Vidocq's self-congratulatory and embellished (well, fictionalized) memoirs. These had a strong influence on the fictional work of Gaboriau.

Gaboriau began by serializing 'sensation' fiction for daily newspapers. Each episode was written to a specified length, and calculated to end in a way to lure the reader into buying the next day's paper. His most famous character is Monsieur Lecoq, a convict-turned-Surete-agent (in imitation of Vidocq), who first appeared in a serial story in 1865. Lecoq works with an amateur investigator named Pere Tabaret, "who has taken up the business of the police, as others do painting or music, for entertainment." An older mentor, Tabaret offers advice from his bed and does not get directly involved, which brings to mind Nero Wolfe and his man-of-action Archie Goodwin. 

In keeping with an Industrial Age mentality, detective Lecoq's power of reason is likened to a machine: if one can vacuum up the right evidence, logic alone will produce the criminal. But Gaboriau also humanizes his detective in a couple of ways. He makes him comically absent-minded, and when his relentless reason exposes as a criminal a man he loved as a son, he becomes depressed. And he holds conversations with the picture of a woman on his snuff box.

Lecoq--who has a proud rooster as a symbol--is a dashing master of disguise like Vidocq (and as Holmes would be). He rises to a prominent position with the Paris police force (again, like Vidocq) and Gaboriau spends much time describing the routines of honest, hardworking policemen in stations, partly to calm public fears of the police. It is because of these descriptions, along with his hero's methodical and scientific approach, that he is often called the father of the police procedural.

Whereas Dickens showed proper Victorian outrage in presenting his villains, with the heavens exacting revenge and the offender repenting in anguish, Gaboriau's villains do not struggle with their conscience. That's because Gaboriau, a Frenchman, presents his bad guys as aristocrats gone wrong, full of self importance and arrogance and greed, committing their crimes without regret against the weak, often geniuses who nearly outwit the brilliant detective. This is the beginning of the "Master Criminal" motif (something Doyle might be imitating with his use of Professor Moriarty?).

Whereas Dickens embedded a crime story within a larger family saga, Gaboriau did the opposite: he began with the discovery of the crime and the detection (Part 1: The Inquiry) and lengthened it by inventing conspiracies to obstruct the detective. Then he connected it to a long and labored tale (Part 2: The Honor of the Name) that exposed the extensive backstory of the youthful indiscretions of an aristocrat that lead up to the crime. So, despite surprises and dangers at the end, the belabored and sentimental Part 2 makes his work slow and boring (this, too, might be something Doyle imitates in "A Study in Scarlet" with that long Mormon section. Incidentally, in "Scarlet", Holmes calls Lecoq 'a miserable bungler'). Even so, Gaboriau's structure in his 4 police novels proved that "the detective story" could become a book-length form, just as the "sensation novel" was dying out.