Monsieur Lecoq by: Emile Gaboriau, Bayard Jones (Illustrator)
Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, reprint, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers, gilt title on spine. 366 pages, 4 b&w plates by Bayard Jones. 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". The story depicts the first case of Monsieur Lecoq, an energetic young policeman and an officer nicknamed Father Absinthe, as they seek out the facts behind the case against the Widow Chupin. Why is she accused of helping another commit a murder? And why another man known only as May in custody? What is the connection? Emile Gaboriau (1833-1873) is an important figure in the history of detective fiction. A French journalist and novelist, he created the "roman policier" with a series of books involving private detective Monsieur Lecoq, who works logically. Lecoq was based on a real-life thief turned policeman named Francois Vidocq (1775-1857), whose memoirs mixed fiction and fact. Gaboriau's huge following was eclipsed by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
