Great French Detective Stories Author:T. J. Hale (Editor) The intention of this anthology is partly historical, but partly too to introduce an English-speaking audience to some Continental writers of detective stories who have been unfairly neglected in this country since the Second World War. With few exceptions, there has been little good detective fiction which has not been written in English ... more »or French. All the authors gathered here are either French and Belgian but they have more in common than the fact that they share the same language.
Some years before Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance in print in 1887, Emile Gaboriau had been writing lengthy serials for the Parisian popular press in which his detective, Monsieur Lecoq, made the same sort of oracular pronouncements as Holmes was to become famous for later. After the Holmes phenomenon, Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux both enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1920's in Britain, and the latter exerted a not inconsiderable influence on the overall development of the detective story.
By the 1930's, Britain and America were producing enough home-grown talent not to be dependent any longer on France, and consequently the many fine Continental writers of that epoch and after are unknown -- or virtually unknown -- in translation. Today, the only Continental writer of detective stories who is read to any significant extent in this country is Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret.
This anthology is representative of a century of French detective writers, and includes Georges Simenon, Gaston Leroux, Emile Gaboriau, Maurice Leblanc, Jacques Decrest, Pierre Véry, Jypé Carraud, Eugène-François Vidocq, and Léo Malet. « less