Monsieur Lecoq, created in 1866 by Émile Gaboriau, is the first police detective hero in fiction. A meticulous and relentless investigator, the character of Lecoq influenced the creation of later fictional detectives and is cited in Conan-Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet. In Monsieur Lecoq, two men are found dead at a bar in a seedy area of Paris, and a third man, wounded, stands in the doorway and dies shortly afterwards. To the Inspector of Police, the case seems straightforward – a pub brawl that ended in murder – but Lecoq is unconvinced and is permitted to investigate further with the help of an older officer, Father Absinthe. In the course of his investigations – which take an ever-tortuous direction – Lecoq is assisted by the ‘armchair’ detective Tabaret, and it becomes clear that the solution to the case lies in a long-standing rivalry between two prominent Parisian families.
