The Widow Lerouge by: Emile Gaboriau, Louise L. Heustis (Illustrator)
Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, reprint, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers, gilt title on spine. 436 pages, 4 b&w plates by Louise L. Heustis. A novel by the nineteenth-century French detective fiction writer Emile Gaboriau, whom Andre Gide referred to as "the father of all current detective fiction". Emile Gaboriau created master detective Monsieur Lecoq, who would appear in a number of books. In The Widow Lerouge (L'Affaire Lerouge), however, Lecoq was a young man on the police force, and it is his senior and mentor Pere Tabaret (also known as Tirauclair) who is center stage. The book begins with the murder of the Widow Lerouge and young inspector Lecoq is on the scene straightaway. The complexity of the case however forces Lecoq to invite detectives Tabaret and Daburon to help and they bring their own methods to the case. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
