memoirs
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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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Dustjacket Cover of Vidocq: The Personal Memoirs of the First Great Detective, trans. Edwin Gile Rich (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1935). Author’s Collection. The primary value of Vidocq’s Mémoires lay in its formulation of the detective as a heroic character. As French historian Dominique Kalifa has convincingly shown, nineteenth-century published accounts of the Parisian bas-fonds…
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Frontispiece portrait by Marie Gabrielle Coignet, in Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de sûreté, jusqu’en 1827, vol. 1 (Paris: Tenon, 1828). Wikipedia Commons: Musée Carnavalet, Paris. In both fact and fiction, Eugène-François Vidocq is often called the first modern detective. His life and exploits are recounted in the Mémoires (1828-1829), a sprawling four-volume collection…
Shady Detectives, Elegant Criminals & Dark Avengers 