Monsieur Lecoq: Émile Gaboriau

Émile Gaboriau (November 9, 1832 – September 28, 1873) was a French writer, novelist, journalist, and a pioneer of detective fiction. His first detective novel, Monsieur Lecoq 1869, which featured an amateur detective and a young police officer (Monsieur Lecoq), was a success and the Lecoq was the hero in Gaboriau’s 3 later detective novels. The character of Lecoq was based on a real-life thief turned police officer, Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857), whose own memoirs, Les Vrais Mémoires de…