Emile Gaboriau

Andrea Goulet (University of Pennsylvania)

Ed. by Tim Unwin, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.05: French Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth-Century , 1800-1900.
Vol. editors: David Elwyn Evans (University of St Andrews), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Elisabeth Gerwin (University of Lethbridge), Nigel Harkness (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield), Jennifer Yee (University of Oxford)

Dates

Born 9 Nov 1832
Died 28 Sep 1873
Activity 1852-1873

Places

Born in France
Active in France

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Gaboriau's Works

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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 22 November 2024.]