The Lecoq Edition - of Gaboriau's Works Author:Emile Gaboriau Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE rHREE names stand out above all others in the field of detective stories: Edgar Allan Poe, an American; Conan Doyle, an Englishman who was a close stu... more »dent of Poe's tales, and Emile Gaboriau, a Frenchman. The names of the detectives -whose characters they created are almost better known, if anything, than the names of the writers themselves, and for the general public, at the word 'detective'' three figures appear before the mind's eye, Monsieur Dupin, Monsieur Lecoq, and Sherlock Holmes. Gaboriau was born at Saujon, in the Department of Charente- Inferieure, November 9, 1835. To show his chronological connection in this famous trio of names it will suffice to say that Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was first published in English in 184-5. Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, translated Poe's tales into French in 1857, at which time Gaboriau, a young lawyer's clerk, was thinking of becoming a writer. Later while a member of a cavalry regiment he made his literary debut with two volumes of humorous observations in no wise remarkable. These were succeeded by several novels, none of which gave indication of the strong dramatic quality that was afterward to make his name so well known wherever French or English is read. About this time he became a member of the staff of one of the well-known Parisian papers, "Le Pays," and it was in this paper, in 1866, that he published "L'Affaire Lerouge" as a serial. Thus we see that nine years after the appearance of a French translation of Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" the first notable American detective story, the first notable i—Vol. i J detective story by a Frenchman was published in Paris. Seven years before the latter appeared, Conan Doyle was born, and his first conspicuous achievement as a writer of detective storie...« less