Monsieur Lecoq by Émile Gaboriau

First published: 1869 (English translation, 1879)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of plot: Nineteenth century

Locale: Paris

Principal characters

• Monsieur Lecoq, a young detective
• Father Absinthe, a veteran detective
• Gevrol, a veteran police inspector
• Monsieur d’Escorval, an examining judge
• May, a suspect
• Père Tabaret, a consulting detective

The Story:

Police agents leave the Barriere d’Italie to make their nightly rounds in a tough, sparsely settled district inhabited by thugs and cheap crooks. In this precinct the police are always careful to move in groups. Their leader is old Gevrol, an unimaginative, fearless inspector. About one hundred yards from Mother Chupin’s wine shop they hear some loud cries, and the whole party rushes forward over the rough ground. The house is closed up tight; only bands of light through the shutters give evidence of life within. One eager young officer climbs on a box to peer through the shutters, and his evident horror at what he sees causes the officers to hasten their attempt to break into the house.

At Gevrol’s order, two agents batter down the door. Inside on the mud floor are three bodies, two men dead and one wounded. Swaying on his feet is a stocky man with a revolver in his hand. On the stairs, a hysterical Mother Chupin hides her face in her apron. One agent seizes the man with the gun and disarms him, while another agent kneels beside the wounded victim, who is wearing a soldier’s uniform. Murmuring that he had received his just deserts, the man dies.

Gevrol diagnoses the affair as a drunken brawl and is pleased that the assumed murderer was so quickly caught. The young agent who had peered through the shutters, however, expresses doubts about the case. Gevrol patronizingly asks him if he suspects some mystery. When the young agent says yes, Gevrol tells him he can stay with the bodies until morning and investigate to his heart’s content.

The doctors leave the crime scene, and a police wagon takes away the accused murderer and Mother Chupin. The young agent stays at the scene with a stolid, seasoned companion, grizzled Father Absinthe. The young agent is Detective Lecoq, who had decided to join the police force after drifting from one job to another for several years. With Father Absinthe to help him, he eagerly looks around the house.

Lecoq’s first find is an earring, half buried in the mud on the floor. It is a diamond earring, jewelry too expensive to be found in Mother Chupin’s establishment. Encouraged, Lecoq goes outside. There is enough snow on the ground for him to reconstruct some of the happenings prior to the murders. Lecoq figured that two women, one young and one older, had visited the house, and that they had been running when they left. A man had met them outside the garden, leading them to a cab. Here the traces become lost.

Lecoq also remembers, however, what the murder suspect had said when he was captured: “Lost! It is the Prussians who are coming!” Only someone who knew Napoleonic history would have used that allusion. He evidently had been expecting someone to return and help him.

Lecoq presents his lucid report to the examining judge in the morning. Monsieur d’Escorval is greatly impressed with Lecoq’s report. Despite Gevrol’s insistence that the case is merely a wine shop brawl, Monsieur d’Escorval agrees with Lecoq and prepares to look fully into the affair. Disgruntled and jealous, Gevrol becomes Lecoq’s enemy.

As soon as the preliminaries are over, Lecoq hurries to the police station to attend the examination of the prisoner. To his disappointment, d’Escorval brusquely orders him to wait in the corridor. Lecoq overhears enough of the examination to realize that the judge seems unwell or upset. He asks only a very few routine questions, and the prisoner’s answers are almost nonsensical. In a very short time the judge hurries out and drives away.

Lecoq is curious. Looking into the prisoner’s cell, he surprises the man in the act of strangling himself. Lecoq removes the band from the prisoner’s throat just in time. Continuing his investigation, he learns that the night before, after the murders, a drunken man had created a disturbance outside the jail. He was locked up for the night in the cell with the murderer. In the morning the police let him go. From the description, Lecoq believes him to be the accomplice, the man who had waited outside the wine shop and helped the two women to their cab.

The next morning, Lecoq has a fresh disappointment. D’Escorval had fallen and broken his leg while descending from his carriage. A new judge is assigned to the examination, causing further delay. The new examiner, Monsieur Segmuller, listens attentively to Lecoq’s analysis and agrees that there is a mystery behind the case. At last the prisoner is brought in for formal examination.

The murderer, giving his name as May, irritatingly insists he has no given name. He says he is a circus performer, and he gives convincing imitations of a barker in French, English, and German. His story is that he had been attacked by the three men and had shot them in self-defense. May is returned to his cell, and Lecoq continues his patient investigation.

The quest for the murderer’s identity is a long hunt. Lecoq and Father Absinthe, working for weeks on fruitless clues, cannot trace the diamond earring. They do find the cab that had picked up two women at the scene of the crime, but the women had left the cab at an apartment house, gone into the courtyard, and disappeared through a back door.

So it went with all the clues. A visitor comes to see the prisoner and shows a pass issued to a relative of Mother Chupin. Father Absinthe tries to trail the visitor but loses him. Lecoq learns of the visit later. He is sure the man is the drunk who had been locked up with the murderer that first night, the man whose general build Lecoq had reconstructed from the footprints in the snow. Then, by spending six days hidden in the garret above May’s cell, Lecoq learns that the prisoner received cipher notes from the outside rolled in bits of bread. Lecoq even suspects Gevrol of helping May, but he can prove nothing.

In despair, Lecoq pulls the old trick of letting the prisoner escape; then he follows him closely. May joins his accomplice outside a high wall. Lecoq watches while the accomplice boosts May over the wall into the garden of the duke of Sairmeuse. The accomplice is captured, but May cannot be found, even after Lecoq searched the duke’s house thoroughly. Lecoq learns nothing from May’s accomplice, a former convict.

As a last resort Lecoq consults old Père Tabaret, the oracle of the police force. The sage listens eagerly, and then logically explains Lecoq’s errors. Tabaret says that D’Escorval had conveniently broken his leg because he knows who the prisoner is and dares not prosecute him. Lecoq cannot find May in the duke of Sairmeuse’s house because May is the duke.

Lecoq has to agree with Tabaret; an obscure detective can do nothing against a duke who undoubtedly is engaged in some mysterious intrigue. If he persists in trying to arrest so great a noble, Lecoq himself will be convicted as a madman. Lecoq gives up the case, but he determines that sooner or later he will get to the bottom of the whole affair.

Bibliography

Brooks, William S. “Émile Gaboriau.” In Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction. Vol. 2. Rev. ed. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2008. The critical essay on Gaboriau includes a brief biography, an analysis of the Monsieur Lecoq mystery series, and suggestions for further reading.

Goulet, Andrea. Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Goulet argues that French literature published from 1830 to 1910 reflects a competition between a traditional idealism and an emerging scientific empiricism. Her analysis of Monsieur Lecoq and other detective fiction demonstrates how these works express a duality between deduction and induction.

Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Monsieur Lecoq, among other detective and mystery novels, is analyzed as a social commentary. The novel is explored as a statement on the social conditions present at the time the book was written.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History. 4th ed. London: Pan, 1994. Monsieur Lecoq is analyzed as an exemplary and influential detective novel. Places Monsieur Lecoq within the tradition and development of the detective and mystery novel.

Thomson, H. Douglas. Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story. 1932. Reprint. Philadelphia: R. West, 1978. Explores Monsieur Lecoq as an influential work. Contains a detailed analysis of the structure and characterizations in the novel.

Wright, Willard Huntington. “The Great Detective Stories.” In The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft. 1946. New ed. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. This chapter includes an analysis of the character Monsieur Lecoq as he develops in Gaboriau’s novel. Compares Lecoq to other great mystery characters.