The question of the identity of the first detective story, of who really wrote it, and the date of its publication again appeared on the Internet with an essay by Paul Collins in a New York Times Book Review on January 7, 2011,^[1] in which he revealed the identity of the author of The Notting Hill Mystery (1862/1863), sometimes said to be the first detective story. The discussion generated by his essay added to the list of writers who might have created the first real detective story. However, the modern detective story, the mainstay of movies, television series, and popular literature, did not arrive in English or in French as a fully developed novel. …major elements of the detective story permeated the works of three feuilletonistes, culminating in the ‘roman judiciaire,’ a novel about the judicial system, the modern detective story. These three writers are Paul Féval, Émile Gaboriau, and Fortuné du Boisgobey. It evolved over a period of more than forty years, with many writers in both French and English contributing to its development. But there was no complete, discernible, distinct genre until mid-nineteenth century. Earlier novelists concentrated on interesting criminals, or a criminal turned policeman such as Mr. Favart in Lord Bulwar Lytton’s Night and Morning (1841), featuring also the ubiquitous Mr. Gawtrey, who says, “I don’t live exactly within the pale of the law. But I’m not a villain!… I’m a charlatan.” While Wilkie Collins is well-known as a forerunner of the fully developed detective story, J. I. M. Stewart is right when he notes in his Introduction to the Penguin Classics 1987 edition to The Moonstone (1868) that Collins’ work is “essentially a ‘primitive’ contribution to the detective genre…. Yet The Moonstone stands alone in its kind; from none of his other books does the modern reader gain a sense of attending upon the birth of the detective story. Even The Woman in White, even though it deals with the unmasking of a crime, is essentially a thriller, and all his later books hold much more mystery than detection. If he realized the full extent of his originality, and of the genre it might have opened up, he made no consistent attempt at its exploitation.”

Poster announcing the publication
of Les Mystères de Paris (1843),
a novel by Eugène Sue (1804-1857).
FROM Octave Uzanne, Le Livre,
Paris, A. Quantin, 1884.

Eugène Sue (Marie-Joseph Sue) and Filibert Audebrand helped develop the genre by adding two features: the hero opposed to unfair law and tension between two characters within the framework of the novel. Eugène Sue’s Prince Rodolphe de Gerolstein in Les Mystères de Paris (1843) lives and works with criminals, speaking their argot and sharing their life, living outside the law to right the wrongs done to him. In Les Trois nuits de Sir Richard Cockerill (1844), Philibert Audebrand created tension by two opposing characters, the magistrate Gisborne and the criminal Barett. Edgar Allan Poe, with his mystery series, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Mary Roget (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844), added the talented amateur sleuth. In the 1850s and 1860s significant novelists began to create realistic detective characters. (William Russell, Detective Thomas Waters; Charles Rabou, Agent Graillet; Charles Dickens, Inspector Bucket; Paul Féval, Scotland Yard Superintendent Gregory Temple.).

The Industrial Revolution, the move to major cities of a class formerly tied to the land, brought forth wider education and literacy, as well as a new reading public. Novels were no longer read primarily by the Romantics or the bored privileged class, the kind of reader Jane Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey. New and competing newspapers appealed to the man in the street, creating a new type of writer, the feuilletoniste, who contributed serialized stories to newspapers on a regular deadline basis. Their stories, “leaves,” were inserted into newspapers, offering exciting adventures that kept readers buying the same newspapers week after week. There were many feuilletonistes like Alexandre Dumas and Georges Sand, who did not concentrate primarily on the law or the outlanders, and they contributed only marginally to the creation of the detective story. However, major elements of the detective story permeated the works of three feuilletonistes, culminating in the “roman judiciaire,” a novel about the judicial system, the modern detective story. These three writers are Paul Féval, Émile Gaboriau, and Fortuné du Boisgobey.

Tourists, and even Parisians today, may walk down the Rue Paul Féval in the eighteenth arrondissement without knowing anything about the most popular feuilletoniste of the mid to late nineteenth century. Paul Henri Corentin Féval (1816/1817-1887) worked briefly as a lawyer, banker, and editor, but entered publishing in 1842. His plots were first set in his native Brittany, based on Breton folktales. His first full-length novel published in serial form was Les Chevaliers du firmament (1843). This novel and the next, Le Loup blanc (1843), began a series of novels on his best known topic: a band of like-minded men forced to work undercover to fight corruption and right wrongs. (A similar plot continued in the television series “Leverage” starring Timothy Hutton.) Plots of his first novels centered around a dispossessed hero who takes over an organization of criminals in order to displace his usurper and claim his birthright, a narrative reminiscent of Robin Hood.

Féval invented elaborate, fanciful conspiracy plots, often based on real organizations, but offering more variation than those of competitors such as Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas. But, despite the competition, Féval’s novels were so popular that they sometimes doubled previous circulation of their newspapers. Pressure from competition disappeared when his rivals were exiled by Napoleon III, leaving him the best know serial writer of the period. Féval finally wove conspiracy plots into fourteen volumes, his best known work, Les Habits noirs. A character in one of these novels anticipates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty and Mario Puzo’s Godfather.

Printed in Paris by Berlats
(c. 1862), this lithographic print by Étienne Carjat depicts Paul Henry Corentin Féval, who is also known as “Féval père” (1816-1887).

Féval began publishing action-adventure novels with La Louve (1855) and L’Homme de fer (1856). His next work went far afield, setting Les Couteaux d’or partly in California and introducing a Pawnee Indian to Paris, where he begins scalping the citizens. With Le Bossu (1857) the French feuilletoniste returned to featuring a character with a dual personality, a nobleman who masquerades as a hunchback. It also includes a plot to rescue Napoleon from Saint Helena.

Féval published three vampire tales, first with La Vampire (1865), sometimes said to have been written in 1856, preceding Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The next two vampire novels appeared much later: La Ville Vampire (I867) and Le Chevalier ténèbre (1875). The popularity of vampire tales exists to the present day. The vampire Mina Harker from Dracula continues her vampire career in the 2003 television series The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

Féval’s work spans four genres, the local color stories of Brittany, the action/adventure novel competing with Sue and Dumas, the vampire novel, and the crime thriller. His work in the last of these made possible the creation of the “roman judiciaire” from Émile Gaboriau, his assistant and follower.

Émile Gaboriau was Féval’s secretary, sometimes his ghost writer, and an editor of his magazine Jean Diable. Before becoming successful as a feuilletoniste, Gaboriau worked on the fringes of the literary world. He edited a small journal, wrote advertising jingles and short satirical articles, as well as researched and published semi-historical stories of royal mistresses (Les Cotillions célèbres) (1861). While he owed much to Féval, his plots are plebeian compared to Féval’s. He wrote no stories about vampires, international conspiracies, or swashbuckling cape and sword heroes. His sinners and the innocent are all too real. Lust, murder, revenge, theft, and jealousy filled Gaboriau’s pages. The television series Law and Order could not show more.

L’affaire Lerouge, Gaboriau’s first successful novel, introduced a secondary character, a young man advised by his first regular employer to make a career choice: to use his superior analytical ability to become either a member of the judicial system or a master criminal. At twenty-five he chose the French Sûreté. This character, Monsieur Lecoq, who never has a first name, appears in four more novels. He serves his apprenticeship in Affaire Lerouge with an independently wealthy amateur detective, Père Tabaret, later his mentor. The popularity of Lecoq’s character led Gaboriau to publish as feuilles, over a period of three years, four more Lecoq novels: Le Crime d’Orcival (1867), Le Dossier 113 (1867), Les Esclaves de Paris (1868), and the final novel in the series, Monsieur Lecoq (1869).

Gaboriau called his novels in the Monsieur Lecoq series romans judiciaries, novels about the judicial system. Prior to the late nineteenth century, the French police had a well-deserved bad reputation. They frequently used criminals as informants, inserting them into the dens of criminal Paris, located then in the barrio around the rue St. Jacques. Political and student unrest had caused barricades to be thrown up in that area and remained there until Baron Haussmann (1809-1891), under the reign of Napoleon III, renovated the Parisian water and sewage systems, demolished buildings and cut through new streets to allow fire and police brigades access to the entire city. Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq begins in the barrio of that pre-Baron Haussmann era.

Like some of his predecessors (Balzac’s Vautrin in Père Goriot; Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean in Les Misérables; Alexandre Dumas’ Jackal in Les Mohicans de Paris), Gaboriau based some of Monsieur Lecoq’s talents on François Vidocq, a master criminal. After serving in the army, Vidocq was convicted of forgery and sentenced to prison. While in prison, he forged documents for a fellow prisoner and had his sentence extended. He escaped several times, using disguises and imaginative ploys to elude the police. He escaped twice from the galleys, once dressed as a sailor, once as a member of a funeral cortege. After his release, he was recruited by the police to spy on his former colleagues and report their illegal activities. He was so successful that he brought together eight friends, also former criminals, and began the Sûreté Nationale in 1811. It was also a successful venture that helped to reduce crimes in Paris enormously. Gaboriau borrowed three of Vidocq’s more useful — and most often used — techniques from Monsieur Lecoq, who is also a consummate actor, master forger, and talented make-up artist.

Gaboriau kept and elaborated many of his predecessors’ techniques; for example, thickening the plot by increasing the tension between two characters with opposite personalities and mentalities. Lecoq’s opposite is his superior in the Sûreté, Gévrol, a man with limited intelligence and without imagination, working faithfully within the framework of police routine, but is jealous and vindictive toward others who are more talented. Contrasted with Gévrol also is the intelligent, inductive Père Tabaret, who directs the investigation in L’affaire Lerouge as an amateur and for his own pleasure. Gaboriau has his passion for detection, saying, as quoted by Père Tabaret:

When reading the memoirs of famous policemen, which rival the most intriguing fables, I was enthusiastic about these men with subtle intuition, smoother than silk, as supple as iron, intelligent and cunning, fertile in unexpected resources, who follow the trail of the crime, the Code in their hands, through the underbrush of legality, just as (James Fenimore) Cooper’s savages follow their enemy in the middle of the American forests. I wanted to be a cogwheel in that admirable machine, to become also Providence on tip-toe, helping in the punishment of crime and the triumph of innocence. I tried, and it’s turned out that I’m not too badly suited for the job.

With Père Tabaret and Lecoq, the policeman is no longer a man working without passion within a dull set of rules, but a man willingly and enthusiastically performing a task he loves.

Two innovations in the detective story which Gaboriau added are the initial focus of the crime and the extended flashback. All of the novels in the Lecoq series begin with a crime, sometimes a murder, sometimes robbery or extortion. The detective investigates the crime in the present; he collects data, interviews witnesses, analyses possibilities and probabilities. He discovers that the crime can only be explained by past events. Then the action switches to an extended flashback elucidating the characters’ past lives. With essential data from the past, the detective returns to solve the crime in the present.

Dorothy Sayers, reviewing Gaboriau in the The Times Literary Supplement, wrote:

The mere reading of the books presents a formidable difficulty, for most of them are out-of-print, and all of them are fat… “I suppose,” says the reader, plaintively, “I shall find him terribly old-fashioneded.” He is old-fashioned; yet he was more so yesterday, while tomorrow may find him back in the fashion.^[2]

Her prophesy, written in 1935, seems to have been fulfilled in the 2000s. He is again published in French and analyzed by Sorbonne professors studying popular literature. Novelist and critic André Gide noted in his Journal on March 4, 1943:

I read without stopping L’affaire Lerouge, Le Dossier 113 and the first volume of Monsieur Lecoq of Gaboriau. I put down the second volume because Gaboriau flounders around in conventional psychology as soon as he leaves his best domain: police investigation, where he shows himself to be an extraordinary pioneer, a forerunner of all detective novels: those of Conan Doyle are only cheap wine compared to his.^[3]

With Monsieur Lecoq, Gaboriau dropped the Lecoq series and created a pair of detective sleuths, a professional policeman, Monsieur Méchinet, and a medical student working to enter the public health services, J. B. Casimir Godeuil. They appeared in a short novel published posthumously in 1878, Le Petit vieux des Batignolles.

Fortuné du Boisgobey
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

In 1878, Fortuné du Boisgobey continued Monsieur Lecoq’s fictitious life with an additional novel in two books: Le Vieillesse de Monsieur Lecoq and Le Nabob de Bahour: Sequel à la Vieillesse de Monsieur Lecoq. Some of du Boisgobey’s novels seem a diluted and pale imitation of Paul Féval’s work. He did not begin his writing career until, over forty, he returned from Africa, where he had served as paymaster to the French forces. Before returning to France, around 1863, he traveled for several years in Africa, the Orient, Germany, Austria, Greece, and Palestine. During the next thirty years he was a prolific writer, producing more than sixty, some sources say a hundred, volumes. He is often said to have used Fortuné du Boisgobey as a pseudonym, which is not true, an error that circulated almost immediately after his death and continues today on the Internet. A close friend and colleague, the American cultural attaché to France after the American War of Secession, General John Meredith Read, tried to dispel this rumor immediately after du Boisgobey’s death, writing:

It is a curious circumstance that one of the Journals in 1891, the day after the death of M. du Boisgobey, stated that his real name was Fortuné Castille, and that he was born at Granville, while another paper declared that he was the son of M. Abraham Dubois of Nantes. I was even told that he cut his father’s name in two, making it Du Bois, and added the last part, Gobey, which was his mother’s name, thus making it du Boisgobey. There is no truth in any of these assertions. M. du Boisgobey simply bore the name to which he was entitled, and which was one of prominence in the last century as well as in this.^[4]

The same information is given in du Boisgobey’s obituary in The New York Times on February 28, 1891, although the writer was certainly neither a friend nor an admirer of his work. The writer lists forty-seven novels and du Boisgobey’s second book of travels, after stating:

Fortunately, readers in France, Great Britain, and the United States did not share this opinion. Du Boisgobey’s works appeared, translated into English, in American bookstores shortly after they appeared in France. The New Princeton Review, describing “those eager to look into his peep show,” wrote:

Give him a murder, a mutilated body, a fast young man with a good heart, a selection from the demi-monde, an ingénue, a duel, a diving bell, and a game of baccarat — with these and a villain (who generally cheats at cards), M. Fortune du Boisgobey and his public are content — It is not very high art — far from that —but you go on reading because things really do occur in the tale, because you are curious, and because your curiosity makes you forget your work, forget your sorrow, forget ‘problems.’ metaphysical, social, financial, or religious.^[6]

Many of du Boisgobey’s novels tend as much toward romance as toward mystery or detective fiction. Some, like Le Bac and Le Crime de l’omnibus intertwine romance and detection so well that one cannot exist without the other. Many of the novels’ plots resemble contemporary soap operas more than genuine detective stories. Titles such as The Felon’s Bequest: A Novel of the Prison and the Boudoir; The Convict Colonel: A Romance; The Sculptor’s Daughter; The Husband and the Diva; The Demi-monde Under the Terror, were some of his most popular novels in the nineteenth century.

Contemporary critics would likely agree with Charles Dickens’ criticism of du Boisgobey’s work:

There is something which we must, some of us, admit, that M. du Boisgobey is, on the whole, amusing. For my part I can forgive a great deal to the man who amuses me. And, unfortunately, there is another thing which we must, some of us admit, that M. du Bosigobey is long. What a sensational novelist that sensational novelist would have been if he had only ‘boiled it down’! Of course, the exigencies of the ‘feuilleton’ method of publication precluded any suicidal tendencies of that description.^[7]

Those following the feuilleton installments of his novels might not have objected to their length, but sometimes found du Boisgobey scandalous. Certainly, he would not be found so in our century. And, although he continued the Lecoq series, he was fundamentally unlike Gaboriau. One of the major differences between them is the social class in which they lived and from which they drew their inspiration. Those following the feuilleton installments of his novels might not have objected to their length, but sometimes found du Boisgobey scandalous. Gaboriau, in his relatively short life, moved around in the police and feuilletonistes working circles: crime and crime scenes, the morgue, the judiciary. Sprinkled throughout his work are satirical comments on the judicial system, the penal system, the double standard in matters of sex, as well as on the pomposity and duplicity of minor government officials. His experience as well as his social and intellectual contacts were more limited than those of du Boisgobey. Wide travel, contact and interaction with international society, intimate friendships and intellectual exchanges with Parisian social and literary contacts provided du Boisgobey with greater insight into social life and problems outside the criminal and judicial worlds. As an intimate friend of Edmond de Goncourt, he interacted closely with the literary elite of the day. Frequently a critic of contemporary social life in France, he noted the inferior position of women even in rich bourgeois families, their unrealistic sexual education prior to marriage, the pretentiousness of the artistic community, as well as of the Parisian and the provincial bourgeois, the strength of gossip, the “qu’en dira-t-on ?” — the worry of what people will say — n the life of the bourgeois, even as he gives a perhaps false and overly sympathetic picture of the aristocracy and Faubourg Saint Germain in Paris.

The tenor of Gaboriau’s work, much of which hinges on some unfortunate love affair or sexual encounter, can be summed up in lines from one of the sixteen-line sonnets of his contemporary, George Meredith, in Modern Love:

while du Boisgobey’s work is best summed up in “The Ballad of the Railway Novels”: