Police procedural set in Paris wherein a young detective struggles to learn the true identity of a man accused of three murders. ( )

While I admit the historical importance of Monsieur Lecoq, it left me feeling frustrated. The premise: a young and ambitious policeman thinks a triple-murder at a low drinking-house in a Paris slum is not all it seems. A chance remark at the scene of the crime suggests to Lecoq that the culprit is an educated man, not a run of the mill criminal. Lecoq uses many ingenious tactics to learn the truth, but is thwarted at every turn by bad luck, the murderer's sneaky accomplice, and his (Lecoq's) own incompetence. The guilt of the suspect is never in doubt; it's his identity and the motive that are in question. This novel certainly kept me reading in suspense, but there are some serious weaknesses.

I am a big fan of detective novels and I like learning where the genre came from. The Moonstone is probably still my favorite of the early examples, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Trail of the Serpent is a close second. In these novels, we have perceptive and clever protagonists who use a combination of logic and subterfuge to solve crimes. This would appear to be the case in Monsieur Lecoq, which appeared just a few years after these British examples. The deductive powers of Lecoq show a lot of promise. Early in the novel there's a passage that surely inspired Arthur Conan Doyle, in which the detective surmises from some marks in the snow that a suspect must be a tall, middle-aged man dressed in a certain kind of hat and suit. He makes a few other similarly awesome moves, and then flounders around impotently for the rest of the novel. I have to agree with Sherlock Holmes that "Lecoq was a miserable bungler." This, for me, was the first black mark against the book. Not that a detective can't make mistakes--in fact, they're more interesting when they do! But I couldn't believe the same person who made such brilliant hypotheses in the beginning should become so apparently stupid later in the same book. It's a matter of continuity.

Also, I wish I had received some warning that the mystery was not going to be resolved. The novel ends with Lecoq learning the identity of the criminal but not the motive or means of the crime. For that, Gaboriau apparently wrote a sequel, a 600-page historical novel, The Honor of the Name, explaining the complicated family history of the murderer. In the Dover edition of Monsieur Lecoq, the editors summarize the plot of this novel and then excerpt about 20 pages that explain the crime and how/why it was committed. This was a singularly unsatisfying way to have the mystery solved for me. I'm not sure if I should blame Gaboriau or myself, but this disappointing end really soured the whole experience of reading Monsieur Lecoq.

So, on the balance, I am glad I read it, and I enjoyed parts. But I can't truly say that I recommend it. ( )