criminals
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Cover of Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune by Gaston Leroux. Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1908. Criminocorpus.org: Bibliothèque des littératures policières, Paris. No one could explain it. Late at night, Mademoiselle Mathilde Stangerson had retired to the guest bedroom attached to her father’s pavilion laboratory, rather than return to the family chateau. At half-past midnight, the
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Cover of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur (“Gentleman Burglar”). Éditions Pierre Lafitte, 1914 (reissue 1921). Illustration by Léo Fontan. Author’s Collection. By 1905, author Maurice Leblanc had hit upon hard times. Born in 1867 to a privileged bourgeois family from Rouen in Normandy, Maurice was well poised to become a literary celebrity. Renowned novelist Gustave Flaubert
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“A Railway Drama: The Montmoreau Affair.” In Le Petit Journal, Supplément Illustré, Saturday, May 16, 1891. Author’s collection. From his prison cell, the celebrated “gentleman burglar” Arsène Lupin had been taunting Sûreté Inspector Ganimard for several weeks.[1] Charged with multiple counts of grand theft, Lupin declared he would not be attending his trial. When the
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Sample portrait parlé (“talking portrait”) anthropometric identity card with Alphonse Bertillon’s self-portrait photo, May 14, 1891. Wikipedia Commons: Criminocorpus.org. While Émile Gaboriau enhanced the image of the Paris police by creating the upright fictional Sûreté Detective Monsieur Lecoq, Alphonse Bertillon set out to reform actual practices at the Paris Prefecture of Police. Applying statistics to
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Le Jargon, ou le langage de l’Argot Réforme (Troyes: Girardon, 1660). Bibliothèque bleue chapbook cover. Gallica: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Two centuries before Paul Féval penned Les Habits Noirs, French readers were already taking delight in publications about argot slang and an imaginary criminal underworld. The foundational Bibliothèque bleue chapbook in this regard is Le
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Ponson du Terrail, Les Drames de Paris: Rocambole, reissued in 157 weekly installments (Paris: Jules Rouff, 1883-1886). Cover by Kauffmann. Collection: Bibliothèque des Littératures Policières, Paris. Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail (1829-1871) was the most prolific and commercially successful popular novelist of nineteenth-century France. His enduring character is Rocambole, a criminal-turned-avenger hero whose exploits were
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The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, “Classics Illustrated” Comics no. 3 (1941). Source: Andrew Wallace, Old-Fashioned Comics, November 8, 2017. “The Diamond and Vengeance” is one of many stories recounted in Mémoires tirés des archives de la police de Paris (“Mementoes drawn from the Paris Police Archives,” 1838), attributed to Parisian lawyer, statistician,
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“Robert Macaire,” caricature of M. Rosolin by Honoré Daumier (1835). Collection: Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 1848, the melodrama Fualdès was staged in Paris at the Théâtre de la Gaité on the Boulevard du Temple, popularly known as the “Boulevard of Crime.”[1] Melodrama, pioneered by playwright Guilbert de Pixerécourt at the end of the
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Engraving by Louis Dupré, “Mr. Fualdès” (1817). Private Collection: Ciminocorpus. The morning of March 20, 1817, the corpse of retired prosecutor Antoine Bernadin Fualdès was discovered with a slashed jugular vein along the banks of the Aveyron River, outside the city of Rodez in Southern France. Over the next two years, an entirely fabricated and
Shady Detectives, Elegant Criminals & Dark Avengers 