Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [40]
L’affaire Lerouge sold well, and Gaboriau produced three more novels in 1867, all with Lecoq as the central character. (In the later works, the author no longer referred to him as a former criminal.) Before Sherlock Holmes appeared, Lecoq was already a master of deduction. In Le crime d’Orcival he states, “The inquest of a crime is nothing more nor less than the solution of a problem. Given the crime… you commence by seeking out all the circumstances, whether serious or superficial; the details and the particulars. When these have been carefully gathered, you classify them, and put them in their order and date. You thus know the victim, the crime and the circumstances; it remains to find the third term of the problem, that is X, the unknown quantity — the guilty party. The task is a difficult one, but not so difficult as is first imagined.” 34 This effort to classify and hypothesize revealed the scientific mind-set that characterized the new detective. Gaboriau’s description of Lecoq’s quarters made this intellectual bent unmistakable: “On the other side of the room was a bookcase full of scientific works, especially of medicines and chemistry.” 35
Unlike Dupin, Lecoq is not just an armchair detective. He actively pursues clues and personally confronts suspects and villains. Gaboriau’s novels include interesting descriptions of Parisian life, as his detective tracks criminals to their locales, revealing their social and family life, sexuality, and politics. Many of his villains are aristocrats gone wrong, frequently big-time financial swindlers, who are particularly frightening because their self-confidence, knowledge, and connections make them more difficult to catch. The police, on the other hand, are sometimes unscrupulous in their methods — as they were in real life. Reflecting Gaboriau’s (and Parisians’) cynicism about the police, he portrays plainclothes detectives provoking fights with criminals whom they cannot arrest on legal grounds in order to charge them with assault and hold them in jail while they look for evidence of more serious charges.
Gaboriau’s fiction looked toward the later achievements of Bertillon. He described the difficulty of identifying criminals, a problem that the real-life criminologist was later to solve. In Monsieur Lecoq (1869), Gaboriau wrote:
Railroads, photography, and telegraphic communication have multiplied the means of identification in vain. Every day it happens that malefactors succeed in deceiving the judge in regard to their true personality, and thus escape the consequences of their former crimes.
This is so frequently the case that a witty attorney-general once laughingly remarked — and, perhaps, he was only half in jest: “This uncertainty in regard to identity will cease only on the day when the law prescribes that a number shall be branded upon the shoulder of every child whose birth is reported to the mayor.” 36
This sort of interplay between fiction and reality was characteristic of much of detective fiction. The fiction writers were inspired by the latest in crime techniques, while real criminologists got ideas from fiction, as one of Bertillon’s contemporaries, Edmond Locard, was to admit.
It was also common for one fictional detective to compare or contrast himself with another. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Dr. Watson asks Sherlock Holmes, “Have you read Gaboriau’s works? Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”
Holmes “sniffed sardonically” at the idea. “Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” he says angrily. “He had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his