The Lerouge Case by Émile GaboriauMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
This 1863 mystery is so very, very French. There are two mistresses central to the plot, one of them particularly awful, and the other one has an illegitimate son, upon whose identity the plot hinges. Everyone is very excitable. Someone literally dies of shame; someone else, rejected by his love interest, runs out to murder the man she prefers to him, can't do it, and falls into a delirium for six weeks. (Said love interest, incidentally, is about 19 at the time of the main events, since it's roughly two years since events, including the rejected suitor's offer, that took place when she was stated to be 17. However, her successful suitor, who is 33, has been trying to convince his father to let him marry her for the past five years, meaning when he started she was 14 and he was 28. Those aren't good numbers by modern standards, though in 1863 France nobody would have turned a hair; that was the year that the age of consent was raised from 11 to 13.)
The inciting incident is that an elderly woman is murdered in a village near Paris. The amateur detective thinks over the scenario, and concludes that obviously she was a former servant who was blackmailing her former employer over an illegitimate child, which turns out to be correct. The detective, by the way, is not Lecoq, even though this is considered the first Lecoq novel; Lecoq appears only briefly at the beginning, with another brief mention late in the book, and his sole role is to bring the amateur detective, Tabaret, into the story. In later books, apparently, Tabaret is his mentor, and Lecoq takes a more active role.
Tabaret then goes to see his neighbour, who by complete coincidence is closely connected with the crime, thus short-circuiting a great deal of tedious investigation and getting straight to the drama and sensation, which was presumably what the original audience was there for. Plus! The investigating magistrate also has a coincidental connection to the prime suspect, one that will give that punctilious official a good deal of angst, because he's not sure he can be fair and impartial. This development, at least, uses coincidence to create difficulties rather than remove them, but I still don't love it. (Though it will later turn out that, in a way, the first coincidence also caused difficulties...) The author lampshades the convenience of the coincidences, and also the ridiculousness of the hackneyed baby-swap backstory, which, of course, doesn't justify either one.
It soon appears that the prime suspect has been expertly and comprehensively framed, with a lot of physical evidence clearly pointing to him. The physical evidence is subtle enough that a bungling police officer, such as the one who's investigating, would miss it, but Tabaret picks up on it because he's very smart (if eccentric). Tabaret is then convinced of the suspect's innocence by the fact that he has (or at least proffers) no alibi, and someone who was as careful as the criminal they're looking for would definitely have one, but also we, the readers, are privy to the suspect's thoughts, and he is not thinking "I done it, it's a fair cop" (or the aristocratic French equivalent).
And then the supposedly bungling officer tracks down his completely different suspect, and there's a twist that gets us re-evaluating the significance for this case of the old forensic maxim "Who benefits?," and makes it pretty clear who the criminal must be (and we've already seen their motive). Cue manic pursuit and dénouement, including another coincidence to help the detective along, and it turns out the murderer wasn't actually as clever or as careful as Tabaret had thought.
This isn't a "procedural" in the English style at all. It's full of Gallic high drama, and the whole book is driven by character interaction, by people desiring things intensely and taking often ill-advised steps to obtain or keep them. It's a roller-coaster ride of emotional beats that, if they were music, would be speed metal. The forensic aspects of the investigation are misleading more than they are helpful ((view spoiler)), and the investigators, far from being the problem-solving plot mechanisms that most English detective novelists would produce starting half a century or more later, are flawed human beings with their own quirks and foibles that impact the plot as well as themselves. The narrator retains a stance of the inevitability of Justice, but the characters come to doubt it, and themselves, deeply.
I'm not sure who translated this particular version, or if they were English or French; the Project Gutenberg text doesn't credit a translator. The phraseology often reflects the original French more closely than a truly idiomatic English translation would, and there are some misplaced or missing commas (for example, comma before the main verb or before "that," or no comma before a term of address). The quotation marks need another going-over as well, since a number of them are missing, while others are where they shouldn't be. Some sentences phrased as questions are missing question marks, while a couple of sentences not phrased as questions do have question marks. There's even an its/it's error. Not a great edition, in other words, and Project Gutenberg is likely not to blame for most of it; they follow the original texts pretty accurately, on the whole.
Although I'm not a fan of the massive role of coincidence in the plot and the over-the-top melodrama, it was a thrilling ride for sure. I'm going to be a bit generous and include it in my annual recommendation list, though right at the bottom of the lowest tier. And I may venture on another Lecoq book, though if it's just like this it will be the last.
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