France
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Publicity Poster for the crime novel L’Amour à Paris by Mr. Goron, former Sûreté Chief, serialized in Le Journal (1889) and purportedly drawn from his Mémoires Inédites (“Unabridged Memoirs”). Illustrated by Paul Balluriau. Gallica: Bibliothèque nationale de France. While Vidocq’s Mémoires laid foundations for the police memoir genre, he was not the first to write…
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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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Caricature of Paul Féval by André Gill. La Lune, September 16, 1866. Wikimedia Commons: Public Domain. In 1866, popular novelist Paul Féval lamented, “For several years now, the crime industry just hasn’t been delivering the goods.”[1] By his calculation, there were upwards of two million upright and intelligent French readers who were dying for crime…
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“The Vicount Ponson du Terrail” by André Gill. La Lune, February 24, 1867. Wikimedia Commons: Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg. Q: Who or what is Rocambole? A: Rocambole is the son of Ponson du Terrail, who created and gave birth to Rocambole. Q: Why did Ponson du Terrail create and give birth to Rocambole? A: Ponson du Terrail…
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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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Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand, left) and Count Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou, right) in Les enfants du paradis, directed by Marcel Carné (Pathé Studios, 1945). Photo: Children of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis), The Criterion Collection DVD (2012). It only took the criminal court three days to convict Lacenaire of theft, murder, and attempted murder. In…
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“Murder in the Cheval-Rouge Passageway” (detail). Causes Célèbres no. 7 (1859). Collection: Bibliothèque des littératures policiers, Paris. When Pierre-François Lacenaire was arrested in January 1835, he was simply a criminal miscreant, yet another thief soon to go on trial for murder. That November, however, courtroom coverage by multiple Parisian newspapers transformed him into a media…
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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…
Shady Detectives, Elegant Criminals & Dark Avengers 