not even under newspaper circumstances
find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the astute
Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized in the
fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred it to
another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tremendous
success.

From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortunate. In
rapid succession followed 'The Crime of Oreival' (1867); 'File No.
113' (1867); the elaborate 'Slaves of Paris' (1869); 'M. Lecoq'
(1869),--in which title appears the name of the moving spirit of
almost all the other stories; 'The Infernal Life' (1870); and four or
five others. All these stories have been translated into almost every
modern language that has a reading public. They brought Gaboriau
a large income during his lifetime, and they are still valuable
literary properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken
in consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.

Gaboriau elevated the detective story to something like a superior
plane in popular fiction. It is a question whether he did not say in a
large measure the strongest word in it, and to all intents and
purposes the last word. His books all have a certain resemblance, in
that we start into a complex drama with a riddle of crime. The
unfolding always brings us sooner or later to a dramatic family
secret, of which the original crime has only been an outside detail.
The secret is the mainspring of the book, and about the middle of it
the reader finds himself chiefly absorbed by it. Indeed, Gaboriau's
novels have often been spoken of as "told backward." Most of the
novels too gain their movement from one source--the wonderful
shrewdness and audacity of a certain M. Lecoq of the Paris detective
service. M. Lecoq was really an exaggeration of the well-known and
wonderfully able Paris detective, M. Vidocq; and there are dozens of
episodes in the course of Vidocq's brilliant professional career which
Gaboriau did not dress up so very much in introducing them into his
stories. There is an individuality to each novel, in spite of the
family likeness. Occasionally, like Dickens, the author attacked
abuses with effect; as in 'The Infernal Life' and 'The Slaves of
Paris' and other books where he has set forth the merciless system of
private blackmailing in Paris with little exaggeration.

As to literary manner, Gaboriau was not a writer of the first order,
even as a French