Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [39]
The great French poet Charles Baudelaire was amazed by Poe, saying that he “experienced a strange commotion” on first reading him. 26 Searching through American magazines for more, and finding stories that he himself had “thought vaguely and confusedly” of writing, 27 Baudelaire became a devotee of the American author. In 1852, he published translations of Poe’s tales along with commentaries that increased Poe’s literary reputation in France, where he became better known than in his native land. The French particularly responded to Poe’s Gothic elements, the dark side of the psyche that Poe would write of as “the blackness of darkness.” 28 Baudelaire, learning of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore in 1849, investigated the circumstances and declared, “This death was almost a suicide — a suicide prepared for a long time.” 29
France’s fascination with Poe did not stop in the 1850s. Pioneers of modernism — among them the symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud — found inspiration in Poe’s works. So did the composer Claude Debussy, who was working on an opera based on Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” when he died. Debussy wrote to a friend, “I have recently been living in the House of Usher which is not exactly the place where one can look after one’s nerves — just the opposite. One develops the curious habit of listening to the stones as if they were in conversation with each other and expecting houses to crumble to pieces as if this were not only natural but inevitable.… I have no confidence in the normal, well-balanced type of persons.” 30
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It was not long before Poe inspired French imitators. The first great French fictional detective (not counting Vidocq’s inventions) was Monsieur Lecoq, who initially appeared in 1865, the creation of Émile Gaboriau. In his name, personal vanity, and frightening reputation, Lecoq echoed Vidocq. Moreover, Lecoq had also been a crook before becoming a detective. His methods, however, came from Dupin: the young Gaboriau had read Baudelaire’s translation of Poe.
Gaboriau was the son of a public official in the provinces who wished for his son to become a lawyer. Rebellious, the young man joined the army and then came to Paris to be a writer. He began as a ghost writer for Paul Féval, a newspaper editor, dramatist, and author of criminal romances for feuilletons. To do research, Gaboriau attended trials, visited prisons, and even roamed the morgues. He was fascinated by the details of police work, the operations of the Sûreté, and the duties of juges d’instruction (investigating magistrates) — ironically finding a certain fulfillment in the profession his father had urged him to follow.
Gaboriau had a large collection of police memoirs and literature on police work. As a result, his detectives, including Lecoq, are very realistically portrayed; for this reason, Gaboriau is regarded as the father of the modern police procedural and, for some, as the inventor of the modern detective novel (for Poe wrote no novels, only short stories). Like Poe, Gaboriau used the science of his time — the chemistry of poisons, photography, and the telegraph. Equally influential was his stress on the importance of logic, the “calculus of possibilities,” 31 in solving the crime.
Lecoq first appeared in 1865 in a feuilleton, which was published the following year in book form under the title L’affaire Lerouge. Lecoq is initially described as a former criminal, now a young member of the Sûreté, whose mentor, a bedridden old man nicknamed Tirauclair (“bringer of light”) helps him solve a case. In this first book, Lecoq has already become a master of