File No. 113

What It's About

The impregnable safe of the Fauvel bank in Paris is robbed of 350,000 francs, and suspicion falls immediately on Prosper Bertomy, the trusted cashier who held one of the only two keys. As the bumbling police detective Fanferlot chases the obvious but wrong answer, the shrewder Monsieur Lecoq begins to see that almost nothing about the case, or the people around it, is quite what it appears to be. The investigation widens into a tangled family drama of old debts, disguised identities and buried secrets.

Key Concepts

The novel turns on the gap between appearance and truth: the "obvious" suspect, the respectable household, and the trusted employee are all rather less straightforward than they seem. It's built around meticulous observation and deduction rather than action, with detection driven by close reading of physical clues and character rather than confession or coincidence. Themes of class, reputation and the fragility of respectable appearances run throughout.

About the Author

Émile Gaboriau (1832–1873) was a French novelist and journalist widely credited as one of the founding figures of detective fiction, writing more than a decade before Arthur Conan Doyle. Born in Saujon, he worked as a secretary and wrote popular serials before finding acclaim with a courtroom and crime story that made his name almost overnight. He was enormously popular in his own lifetime, and his novels remained bestsellers for decades after his early death in Paris.

About This Edition

This is an 1875 translation by James R. Osgood & Co.