Today in History: Émile Gaboriau was born on this day in 1832. Gaboriau was a pioneer in detective fiction with his famous sleuth, Monsieur Lecoq. In fact, France seems to be the birthplace of the Detective genre. Voltaire, the great French philosopher had a work of philosophical fiction called Zadig, and Zadig, an ancient philosopher, had powers of marvelous deduction. Edgar Allan Poe based his three detective stories in France with his detective Auguste Dupin, and it is said that he may have been inspired by Zadig. These french detectives laid the groundwork for Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes." In fact, Holmes liked to lash out at his predecessors. He once called Poe's Detective Dupin "a very inferior fellow." Holmes also criticized Emile Gaboriau's detective Lecoq. Dr. Watson describes Holmes's reaction:
"Have you read Gaboriau's works?" I asked. "Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?" Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. "Lecoq was a miserable bungler," he said, in an angry voice; "he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid."~A Study in Scarlet
See also: Detective Fiction in France, article in The Saturday Review 1886
The Detectives of Poe, Doyle, and Gaboriau by Carolyn Wells 1913
See also True Crime + Mystery Fiction - 500 Books on 2 DVDroms
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