Emile Gaboriau

Émile Gaboriau (1832–1873) was a French novelist and journalist regarded as the father of detective fiction. After early work as a secretary and as a journalist in Paris, he turned in the 1860s to serialised crime novels: L'Affaire Lerouge (1866) introduced the amateur detective Père Tabaret, and Monsieur Lecoq (1868) made a police detective its hero for the first time, working out conventions — reconstructed crime scenes, disguise, a rival investigator — that later shaped Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. He continued writing until his death in Paris at forty.