Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas. 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.

Émile Gaboriau (1832-1873) was a French journalist and novelist who worked in Paris. He is recognized as an early master of the detective novel, creating the investigator Monsieur Lecoq, who appears in such works as The Lerouge Case and File No. 113.