L’Affaire Lerouge, Le Crime d’Orcival, and Les Esclaves de Paris by Emile Gaboriau.

L’Affaire Lerouge (The Lerouge Affair)

The French writer Emile Gaboriau became a trailblazer of detective fiction with writing L’Affaire Lerouge in 1866. The novel about a murder of a wealthy woman that was done on the outskirts of Paris. A group of detectives arrives and takes a false trace until the coming of a rich man Tabaret, for whom the solving crimes is a hobby, but besides that he has a talent, which includes a deduction – an element that would inspire Arthur Conan Doyle in creation of the Sherlock Holmes books. Alongside with a protagonist presents another police worker, who was a criminal, Lecoq whose character was inspired by Eugene-Francois Vidocq, a thief turned police agent and founder of national police and private detective agencies. Lecoq appears in four more of Gaboriau’s novels.

That contemporary period in which the novel was written and around setting are appealing. Its aesthetics and happening adorn the detective. The text is well-written, but the author includes a needless information in his depicting and explains already understandable.

The detective’s narration moved smoothly, and Tabaret’s disclosing personality and deduction method were imposing–until the lead character returned to his Paris home and decided to visit his neighbors. There he finds a connection to his investigation. He admits the coincidence as incredible, but it couldn’t be acceptable for a good detective. I turned the pages to read that he met the murderer in that apartment. There was no necessity to continue reading.

Le Crime d’Orcival (The Crime of Orcival)

In 1867, Emile Gaboriau makes a sequel Le Crime d’Orcival in which Lecoq–who is a detective this time–becomes a protagonist. The investigation of this book is a murder of a countess in a French commune.

The author wasn’t capable to create the crime intricate. The count killed his wife and wanted to make believe that his absence perceived for disappearance. He attempted to stage the scene to suggest that many people had been in the house, but it collapses immediately because why break the furniture if some of them could open with inserted keys or there didn’t require a big force. The personality of Lecoq was changed and lost a resemblance with Vidocq. If the lead hero was considered as an ex-law violator in L’Affaire Lerouge, he becomes a man who wanted to steal but decides to join police instead that in the second book. Anyway, his personality was appealing among presented citizens of Orcival with qualities aren’t attractive until it is revealed that he is an arrogant man in likes to praise own detective skills. The demonstration of deduction was imposing, but sometimes its work was without basis from where he made these observations. The personage loses his touch. If he didn’t believe that two arrested men are innocent, while he did so to a mayor’s daughter letter who claimed that intends to finish with herself. That killing a melodramatic scene shows Lecoq was ready to cry as well. There he accepts a commune’s judge’s words that it was done by the count without getting a motive first.

Gaboriau makes his writing credible, but the prose itself deteriorates with his previous book. Needless facts, such as the quantity of weather vanes on a building. His depiction of Orcival contains is outside from the narrative. A significant shortcoming that the French writer brings a conversation style time by time what is unprofessional. As well as, Gaboriau uses poor metaphors such as: “The young man is so directed towards the Valfeuillu Park, a few steps away only, and with little regard for Article 391 of the Penal Code, he crosses the wide ditch that surrounds the property of M. de Trémorel.” Sometimes the writer is rough and irrelevant in metaphorical depicting of characters’ feelings. His heroes get one traits while display opposite–for instance, one servant was showed that he doesn’t need punishing but he behaved as a man who deserves it, and some characters wanted to do that. The unmatchable characteristic of this personage will be pronounced in the text more than one time and without a point. Once the author began a thought and ended in contradiction: “The streetlights of Orcival may not illuminate much, but on winter evenings, when there is fog especially, the petroleum oil spreads an abominable smell.” Gaboriau could forget or he didn’t think that repeats himself when Lecoq considers the count a man who committed the crime, and then he begins to reason about the crime in which calls the murderer’s name again and that trembles the commune’s judge and the doctor who both were always there and have been listening.

Eventually, I turned to the last pages to get the expected and quit this novel.

Les Esclaves de Paris (Slaves of Paris)

I passed the third book Le Dossier no 113 (Dossier No 113), which was published in the same 1867. The reason was that I hadn’t it, and I didn’t want for respective reasons. I had the following Les Esclaves de Paris to which I was without a faith about it would be different. The novel was released in 1868.

It was riveting to read about Paris in the time of the launched renovation. It was a literal transfer of the epoch. Gaboriau depicts a poverty and impurity that characterized the old capital. He makes beautiful and long in his writing of places and people. The author is far advanced in prose and the metaphors became sharp – at least in the part that I read. The Frenchman aspired to be alike to Honore de Balzac whom was esteemed by him. However, the maturity didn’t happen with the story. He doesn’t invent the mystery of crime once again. The characters without strong personalities. A poor girl assumes that the offered five hundred francs from a fleabag old man could be gotten criminally, but that thought doesn’t hold and she takes the financial paper despite she always had a disgust to this personality. There can be close to the dime writing, as all three books have a personage that appears at a convenient moment when a conversation has just ended. I’ opened the final pages to get a usual, which I had seen in Gaboriau’s book before. Make unhappy people are happy. Marriage in the end, but it is in a mass quantity this time, and a man with a low income reveals as a son of noble humans. It needn’t to read, though I could do it for the depiction of transforming Paris, but I always can find somewhere else about that.

One year later, in 1869, Gaboriau wrote a prequel Monsieur Lecoq, which I hadn’t necessity to look for. These raw detective books appeared when this genre was at nascent.