MONSIEUR LECOQ – This French detective, who worked for the Surete, was created by France’s Emile Gaboriau, a former secretary of THE Paul Feval, the famed writer. The Gaboriau novels featuring Lecoq (whose first name was never revealed, like Columbo) all came out in the 1860s, making him one of the western world’s Big Three fictional detectives who came BEFORE Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in 1887.
The other two, of course, are Auguste Dupin (1841) and Nick Carter (1886). Like Monsieur Lecoq, Dupin and Carter were among the figures depicted in individual episodes of Les Grands Detectives (1975) on French television. Here are the novels that Emile Gaboriau wrote featuring this brilliant procedural detective.
L’AFFAIRE LEROUGE (serialized in 1865, novelized in 1866) – This novel, set in 1862, depicted Lecoq as an assistant detective who was refining his trade with the help of another Gaboriau detective named Tabaret. In this story alone, Lecoq is a figurative Archie Goodwin to the less mobile Tabaret’s Nero Wolfe.
The widow Claudine Lerouge is found murdered in her home but the killer is not known. Tabaret and his supporting detective Lecoq investigate and must sift through clues regarding Lerouge’s mysterious past involving false identities and illegal child swapping. Continue reading
LES GRANDS DETECTIVES (1975) – A few years back in Balladeer’s Blog’s Forgotten Television category, I reviewed every episode of the British television and radio series 
THE SIX DEAD MEN (April 21st, 1975) 
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