Emile Gaboriau

Andrea Goulet (University of Pennsylvania)
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Known to us as the “father of French detective fiction”, Emile Gaboriau preferred the term “judiciary novel” to describe the crime stories that brought him widespread success in the 1860s. Indeed, his best-known works –

L’Affaire Lerouge

(1865),

Le Crime d’Orcival

(1866), and

Monsieur Lecoq

(1868) – owe as much to the titillating exposure of the French justice system as to the deductive skills of his detectives Lecoq and Tabaret. But it was Gaboriau’s narrative formula of crime-investigation-discovery, inspired directly by Edgar Allan Poe’s founding tale

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

(1841), that led him to be imitated by Fortuné de Boisgobey and other popular writers. Most famously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle modelled his Sherlock Holmes series on Gaboriau’s…

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Citation: Goulet, Andrea. "Emile Gaboriau". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 April 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1662, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1662 Emile Gaboriau 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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