(1835-1873)
To speak of the detective novel is to speak of Gaboriau. He cannot be
called the father of it; but the French novelist made his field so
peculiarly his own, developed its type of human nature so
painstakingly, created so distinctive a reputation associated with it,
that it is doubtful whether any one can be said to have outrivaled
him.
Born at Saujon, in the Department of the Charente-Inferieure, in 1835,
Gaboriau drifted from school into the cavalry service; then into three
or four less picturesque methods of keeping body and soul together;
and finally, by a kind of literary accident, he became the private
secretary of the Parisian novelist Paul Feval. His first successful
story ran as a continued one in a journal called Le Pays. It was 'The
Lerouge Affair,' but it did not even under newspaper circumstances
find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the astute
Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized in the
fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred it to
another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tremendous
success.
From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortunate. In
rapid succession followed 'The Crime of Oreival' (1867); 'File No.
113' (1867); the elaborate 'Slaves of Paris' (1869); 'M. Lecoq'
(1869),--in which title appears the name of the moving spirit of
almost all the other stories; 'The Infernal Life' (1870); and four or
five others. All these stories have been translated into almost every
modern language that has a reading public. They brought Gaboriau
a large income during his lifetime, and they are still valuable
literary properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken
in consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.
Gaboriau elevated the detective story to something like a superior
plane in popular fiction. It is a question whether he did not say in a
large measure the strongest word in it, and to all intents and
purposes the last word. His books all have a certain resemblance, in
that we start into a complex drama with a riddle of crime. The
unfolding always brings us sooner or later to a dramatic family
secret, of which the original crime has only been an outside detail.
The secret is the mainspring of the book, and about the middle of it
the reader finds himself chiefly absorbed by it. Indeed, Gaboriau's
novels have often been spoken of as "told backward." Most of the
novels too gain their movement from one source--the wonderful
shrewdness and audacity of a certain M. Lecoq of the Paris detective
service. M. Lecoq was really an exaggeration of the well-known and
wonderfully able Paris detective, M. Vidocq; and there are dozens of
episodes in the course of Vidocq's brilliant professional career which
Gaboriau did not dress up so very much in introducing them into his
stories. There is an individuality to each novel, in spite of the
family likeness. Occasionally, like Dickens, the author attacked
abuses with effect; as in 'The Infernal Life' and 'The Slaves of
Paris' and other books where he has set forth the merciless system of
private blackmailing in Paris with little exaggeration.
As to literary manner, Gaboriau was not a writer of the first order,
even as a French popular novelist. But he knew how to write; and there
is a correctness of diction and a nervous vivacity that is much to his
credit, considering the rapidity with which he produced his work, and
the fact that he had no sufficient early training for his profession.
He is seldom slipshod, and he is never really negligent. He has been
criticized for making his denouements too simple, if one regards them
as a whole process; but his details are full of variety, and the
reader of Gaboriau never is troubled to keep his attention on the
author's pages, even in the case of those stories that are not of the
first class among his works. Perhaps the best of all the novels is one
of the shorter ones, 'File No. 113.'