A countess is found murdered at her château at Orcival, everything at the scene tells a clear story, and Monsieur Lecoq's mentor 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 contains the first staged crime scene in fiction, and everything since owes it.

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.