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Brand-new English translation by Sofia E. V. Hamett – not a reprintThe safe needed a key and a word. Two men had both. One of them is lying.On the morning of 28 February, the house of Fauvel opens as usual. By ten o'clock the strongroom has been found 350,000 francs lighter, and the cashier is under arrest.The safe is one of the new ones: five lettered dials and a lock that cannot be forced. It has been opened with the key and the word, and only two men in Paris hold both. Prosper Bertomy, the cashier, who says he did not do it. And André Fauvel, the banker, who is above suspicion.The police close the case in a morning. A stout, cheerful gentleman named Verduret does not. He notices a scratch on the door of the safe that should not be there, and begins pulling at a thread that runs back twenty-five years — through a marriage, a masked ball, a country house on the Rhône, and a letter that a respectable family has been paying to keep unread for two decades.Verduret is Monsieur Lecoq.Gaboriau's detective spends most of this novel in disguise, and the reader is let into the secret long before the criminals are.From the man who invented the detective novel.Émile Gaboriau (1832–1873) built the machine every crime writer has used since. Before him, a mystery was solved because somebody confessed or somebody was caught. After him, it is solved because a trained man kneels on a floor and reads it: the footprint, the scratch on the safe, the lie that does not fit the timetable. Conan Doyle read him closely and admired him — which did not stop him having Sherlock Holmes dismiss Lecoq, in A Study in Scarlet, as a bungler. It was a young writer clearing the ground.A new translation, made to be read.Gaboriau wrote for the newspapers, in clipped one-sentence paragraphs built for daily instalments. This edition does not reproduce that layout. Sofia E. V. Hamett has rendered the novel into the natural English of a modern crime novel — faithful to every character, scene and turn of the plot, but written to be read today rather than studied. Where the French leans on the vocabulary of banking and criminal procedure, the sentence carries the explanation. No footnotes.Complete and unabridged in 25 chapters. Book Five of The Gaboriau Files. Read more
