The Lerouge Case

A widow is strangled in her cottage at La Jonchère, and an old amateur named Tabaret works out the murderer's height, age, habits and profession from the room in an afternoon — and is wrong. Gaboriau published this in 1866, the first true detective novel in French; Lecoq is a junior man in it, and the point of the book is that a brilliant deduction from physical evidence can convict an innocent man. Sixty plates of Daumier and Monet trace the fogbound city and the criminal crowd, matching Gaboriau's own lesson that appearances deceive.