A countess is found murdered at her château at Orcival, everything at the scene tells a clear story, and Monsieur Lecoq reads the room in an hour — which is how the reader learns that a scene can be composed like a sentence. Gaboriau built the French detective novel out of the police gazettes; this 1867 book turns on a staged crime scene, a device detective fiction has used ever since. Fifty-eight plates of Paris and its people, from Daumier to Manet, catch the same city and its criminal types that Gaboriau's detective reads so closely.
