CRIME IN FICTION.

by Alexander Innes Shand
(1832-1907)

      COMEDY is the salt and life of fiction, as the pathos which is the highest triumph of the artist, evoking natural emotion without sensible effort, may be said to be fiction's soul. When pathos degenerates into vapid sentiment, it is sometimes an opiate, though more often an irritant. Soporifics are very well in their way, but on the whole the patrons of the circulating libraries prefer to be excited and interested. Hence the popularity of the sensational novel, taking horrors for its subjects and criminals for its heroes, and leading the reader onwards from surprise to surprise to the dramatic dénouement which should be enveloped in mystery. The range of the criminal romance is wide enough in all conscience. At the best it may be the subtle masterpiece of the analytical genius of a Balzac; at the lowest, though not invariably at the worst, it may be dashed off in blood and thunder for the "penny dreadfuls" and the "shilling shockers." Much depends, of course, on the public for whom the romance is intended; and the blood-besmeared story which has a grand success in the New Cut would possibly not go down in Belgravian drawing-rooms. Yet we venture to affirm that the criminal romance pure and simple, although it may be devised with the practical instincts of a Gaboriau or toned down with the literary taste of a Bulwer, has one unfailing characteristic — it leaves an unpleasant and unwholesome flavour behind. Like the garlic in Provençal cookery, the savour may seem to be smothered for the time, but there is an arrière goût that comes out sooner or later. There are fascinating novels which are as edifying in their way as Thomas à Kempis or the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Like the plays of Shakespeare or the poems of Milton, they raise us for the time on the wings of heaven-born genius towards the noble ideals of the highest life. After we have smiled and wept — the weeping is a figure of speech — we feel morally better and much the happier. But after a tale of crime, however talented it may be, some taint of the disreputable company we have been keeping clings to us: we feel as if we had been conniving at their guilt, if not actually accomplices in it. There are worthy folks, as we are given to understand, with unimpeachable moral records, who come to find an actual relish in that vicarious degradation, and who draw lingering breaths of ineffable pleasure in the vitiated atmosphere of the police-cells and the jails. In rare cases, like M. Lecoq in Gaboriau's 'Crime d'Orcival,' they even give a loose rein to their perverse imaginations, and revel in the clever escroqueries they might have committed had the chances of their lives offered favourable opportunities. But cases of this kind are altogether exceptional. It is asserted, and we daresay with some truth, that novels like Ainsworth's 'Jack Sheppard,' and illustrated sheets like the 'Police News,' have largely recruited the ranks of the thieves and the burglars. There the seed had fallen in kindly soil prepared by circumstances and hereditary depravity. The mass of amateurs of the horrible in the upper or middle classes are more prosaically minded or less romantically disposed. At all events, they seldom dream of translating thought into action, and taking the short but dangerous cuts to their crimes which come so naturally to their favourite heroes and heroines. They are content to admire, to gape, and to swallow; to shrink delightfully at the rustle of the stealthy poisoner's night-dress, and to shudder at the heavy thud of the hired ruffian's bludgeon as it lights upon some respectable head. Criminal fiction does little direct harm, in the sense of shortening inconvenient lives or tampering with important deeds. But it steadily demoralises the palate for anything milder and more delicately flavoured: the habitual dram-drinker will have his stimulants stronger and stronger, and you cannot expect him to turn with satisfaction from spirits above proof, fresh from the distillery, to the choicest of Schloss Johannisberg or Château Yquem.

      Originally, and in the classical English novelists, crime was treated incidentally and episodically. Criminals are introduced, of course, among the other figures in the mirror the novelist held up to life. Tom Jones and the far more disreputable Roderick Random had no ugly skeletons in cupboards which they kept carefully locked. They might fear the tap of a bailiff on the shoulder, they might pass a night in the round-house at St Giles, and be fined and sermonised by the magistrates at Bow Street next forenoon, but there was little chance of their figuring at the Old Bailey, or wearing the heavy irons in Newgate. Lady Bellaston was loose in morals and behaviour, but she never played the Brinvilliers, nor was she implicated in bigamy and murder. Necessarily we come across highwaymen like Mr Rifle, but then the gentlemen of the road were as familiar types in old English travelling society as the stage-waggoner, the tapster, or the ostler. Scott, as he owned himself, had an involuntary sympathy with his ruffians. In his poetry the Bertrams came to the front, while the sighing, intellectual, and sentimental Wilfreds were shoved to the wall. So in the novels the old reiving spirit would still come out, which valued a man for his courage and his sinews, and looked leniently on the manly peccadilloes of rascals who shifted for their living. "He's gaun to die game," said Dandie Dinmont, looking down on Dirk Hatteraick, when he had been mastered and garotted. "Weel, I like him nane the waur for that." And Colonel Mannering, in his different degree, expresses a very similar sentiment when both Dirk and Glossin have been run to ground. The sturdy Borderers and the gallant Indian campaigner give utterance to Scott's own feelings. His favourite criminals live in the free air, and though true enough to the life, are the lineal descendants of the Forest outlaws and of the daring buccaneers who "bartered English steel for Spanish gold." 'The Pirate' should, par excellence, be a criminal romance, if we judge by the title. So it is in one sense, yet there is much that is heroic in its hero, and even Goffe, and the boatswain, and the pirates of coarser mould, have nothing that is mean or sneaking about them. Instead of intruding the melodramatic scenes which would bring down the galleries in provincial theatres, the novelist stretches a point and his artistic conscience to make his buccaneers presentable in respectable society. He merely indicates how powerfully realistic he might have been had he pleased, in the fond recollections of weather-beaten veterans of former experiences on the Spanish main, when, in their very recreations, they anticipated the horrors of the Hell to which they were hastening.

      'The Pirate' is nominally a criminal romance. What we really carry away is the charming impression of the picturesque scenery of the storm-beaten Shetlands, and of the rude luxury and primitive hospitality of the lusty Udaller, that prince of good fellows. Villany must be interwoven in the novelists' webs, but with Scott's frank and honourable sympathies his villany is always rising to the surface. He prefers the manly and open action that defies rather than eludes law and morality. Lady Ashton stoops to trickery and deceit, it is true, but it is the domineering mistress of the household, the grande dame of the indomitable Douglas blood, who prepares the lamentable tragedy of the 'Bride of Lammermoor.' Dirk Hatteraick "tips" little Harry Bertram overboard, but he explains that he did it in the heat of temper. He is ready to fight his Majesty's revenue cutter without regard to the weight of her metal, and he readily assents, in the way of business, to storming and sacking the custom-house at Portanferry. Even the Daddy Ratcliffe of the 'Heart of Mid-Lothian' is a bold scoundrel though a cunning one. When Scott seeks his villains in more exalted spheres, they are evidently sketched against the grain in outlines that are somewhat shadowy. The Varney of 'Kenilworth' at his best is a pale copy of Iago, as the old alchemist and poisoner is but lightly touched in the passing. The exceptions are in the unscrupulous or rascally Scotch lawyers, — the Sharpitlaws and the Glossins, — who are vigorously etched in with biting acids in the satirical zeal of professional interest, and with the confidence of intimate knowledge. But Scott's heart was never in the delineation of the class of culprits who have given occupation to the professional detectives of fiction, with their keen scent and preternatural sagacity.

      The French are our masters in criminal romance. In the first place the French bring an amount of patience to their work which is rare indeed with English novelists. And the patient thought which credibly works out all possible combinations is at least as indispensable as ingenuity and acuteness to the success of the criminal novel. Alphonse Daudet, for example, apologised for the slovenliness of his 'Jack,' on the score of certain unfavourable circumstances having prevented his rewriting it twenty times, as he would otherwise have done. He may have exaggerated, but he gave expression to an undeniable truth. Take Balzac, for example, who in his own particular style stands unapproached and unrivalled. Balzac wrote by tremendous and protracted spurts, stimulating and bracing his nerves with the strongest coffee. He did not trouble himself to rewrite, as a rule, although perhaps he was even more fastidious than the author of 'Eothen' in correcting and revising his proofs. But because the workmanship was hasty and even hurried, does it follow that it was careless? On the contrary, his mind was absolutely saturated with his subjects, and no novelist ever lived in such continual intimacy with a wide world of familiar characters. His inner life was an incessant dissipation which might well have worn out a more robust man; and we can only marvel at the range and grasp of the versatile intellect which could embrace that limitless "Comédie humaine." The very idea of working on such a width of canvas seemed madly audacious, and yet Balzac lived to realise the better part of his ambitious dreams. That intellect of his was microscopic as comprehensive. Though we may appear to be riding a metaphor to death, for no such combination in painting is conceivable, he was at once a Titian, a Rembrandt, a Michael Angelo, and a Teniers. Now his pictures blaze in the gorgeous colouring of the Venetian school; now they show the fantastic contrasts of bright light and blackest shadow; now criminals consciously predoomed to the torments of the damned remind us of Michael Angelo's terrible frescoes. Yet they are continually filled in and elaborated with a Teniers-like minuteness of touch. Balzac may be said to have set the fashion of following out an intricate network of lives through an interminable series of volumes. It is little to say that he never loses sight of any one meant to be more than a mere walking gentleman or lady. He develops an infinite variety of character, with growing years and changing circumstances, so that, with fair allowance for altered conditions, they shall invariably be true to their former selves. And any writer who has made similar attempts on the most modest scale will appreciate the triumphs of that subtle physiologist.

      Since the Revolution swept away the ancient régime, France has been the Paradise of successful adventurers The Press, the Bar, the Chamber of Deputies, and sometimes the Barricades, have been the stepping-stones to the highest and most lucrative places. The men of the Second Empire undoubtedly deserved much of the abuse they received; but after all, they only improved on the principles and practice of the Imperialists under the great Napoleon, of the Legitimists of the Restoration, and the constitutional monarchists. No one has painted these parvenus like Balzac, with the state of society and the scandals by which they profited. As a rule they could scarcely be called criminals, although they sailed uncommonly near the wind, and were generally accessible to sordid temptations. But the course of justice was systematically perverted; Crown prosecutors and removable judges, on their promotion, were always amenable to the influence of ministers, and of the grandes dames by whom ministers were governed, and to whom they paid their court. A Lucien de Rubenpré compromises himself under the tutelage of a Jacques Collin: he is arrested, and will be sent from the Conciergerie to the Cour d'Assizes with the moral certainty of a just condemnation. Had he been friendless and unprotected his fate was sure. No doubt he has bitter enemies, but he has powerful friends. The honour of noble families is involved. Lucien becomes the centre of a subterranean battle, in which procuresses force their way into the bedchambers of fashionable duchesses, and venerated judges of the supreme courts give significant hints to official prosecutors. So Lucien is saved, — or at least he would have been saved had he not weakly rushed upon suicide, instead of resolutely seeing matters out. In such a corrupt state of society the cynical student of humanity saw rare opportunities. The most well-meaning of men might tamper with their consciences. Even charitable doctors of exceptional talent like Bianchon, devoted to their profession, and rich beyond their needs, become culpably tolerant. They were men of the world, and consequently men of their world. As for penniless young aspirants such as Eugene de Rastignac, the Gascon soldiers of fortune of the nineteenth century, they would sell their souls for their ambitions on small provocation. If they are ballasted with any scruples to begin with, they very soon throw them overboard. Rastignac, when a student in the pension of the Rue Sainte Genevieve, listens to the Mephistophelian suggestions of Collin, though he shudders at them. As he struggles forward in life he silences the whispers of conscience, and all that keeps him straight is the dread of being found out. With his supple talents, his friends of the softer sex, and his seductive manners, of course he becomes a highly considered member of ministries in point of character, and makes a fair show to the world. So it may be conceived what Balzac, with his relentless surgery, can disclose as to the innermost existence and the secret methods of the adventurers, of whom Rastignac is one of the most respectable.

      We know nothing more grandly fascinating in the lurid sensations of crime than the checkered career of Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, alias Trompe-la-Mort. Collin, in the genre of the diabolical and depraved, is a conception that might have done honour to the poets of the 'Inferno' or the 'Paradise Lost.' He might have given Milton's Satan useful hints as to how the ruin of the race of Adam might be compassed. He has prostituted to the vilest purposes the soaring and flexible genius which might have made him duke and peer and prime minister. His extraordinary individuality casts something like a spell over all the individuals with whom he comes in contact. His moral is equal to his physical courage: nothing daunts him, and everybody seems to realise that. A convict, with the record of numerous convictions, dragging the limb involuntarily which has been fettered in irons at the bagne, he confounds the shrewd intelligence of the most experienced magistrates and jailers, as, with the machinery and the subordinates he has at his disposal, he baffles the best agents of the Rue de Jerusalem. When he chooses to clothe himself in the skin and priestly dress of Herrera, accredited envoy from the Court of Madrid, he defies detection, or at least conviction. Yet when he is sent on suspicion to the common yard of the Conciergerie, he sinks at once and easily to the brutal level of his old accomplices, La Pourraile and Fil de Soie. He succeeds in bringing them back to subserviency with a glance and a whisper, though he has betrayed his trust as treasurer of their secret society, and squandered their treasure on one of his protégés. For the monster is not without redeeming qualities — he has a great fund of affection to lavish, and is even capable of acts of heroic self-abnegation. All that sounds improbable — incredible; yet the genius of the novelist has made Collin a reality. There can be no more flattering tribute to the vraisemblance of that phenomenal creation than the fact that the cravate à la Collin has become a fashionable article of attire among the roughs and ruffians in the purlieus of Paris.

      From the wonderful series of volumes immortalising Jacques Collin, beginning with the 'Père Goriot' and ending with 'La dernière Incarnation de Vautrin,' we feel as if we had come down to comparatively vulgar crime in opening 'La Histoire des Treize.' Yet what a wonderful effort it is, when measured against the best work of inferior writers. It is not only that the combination of the conscienceless Thirteen in the highest and the lowest ranks of society, pledged to each other body and soul, gives occasion for stirring and dramatic episode. It is not only that we follow with thrilling interest the fortunes of some luckless victim who stumbles blindly among the snares that are spread for him on every side, till finally he comes to the miserable and inevitable end. It is not only that we assist at the diabolical conceptions of schemes carried out with unparalleled audacity. But the characters are instinct with violent passions, which they control or direct for the common purpose: they even make their virtues the instruments of crimes which they must have regarded with horror while still unfettered; and if they are shocked by confessions of the most revolting cynicism in the comrades who have been loyally aiding and abetting them, at all events they suppress any show of feeling. All that would appear at the first blush to be at least as incredible as the conception of Collin. But, in fact, the adventures of those high-born and high-charactered villains are made so real to us, that we follow them with the simple faith of a child rather than with the scepticism that is always staggering over difficulties.

      It is a deep drop from Balzac to Eugene Sue; and so, while the one is likely to live for ever, the other, like Giant Pope in the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' is held in little regard now, and almost moribund. Yet the socialist novelist, like the Giant, was a great man in his day. The Mysteries of Paris,' 'The Wandering Jew,' and 'Martin the Foundling,' circulated in the feuilleton — we were going to say by the million — and were greedily devoured when they came out again as books. Sue, who preached equality and the contempt of riches, who made Martin the footman correspond with the Scandinavian king, furnished his Touraine chateau like a prince, and indulged the sumptuous tastes of a sybarite. He certainly hit off the popular taste, and was clever enough to deserve his ephemeral popularity. Like Balzac, he went to work on an enormous scale, and combined his complicated plots with extreme ingenuity. The intrigues of the Jesuits in 'Le Juif Errant' are carried out with great skill, especially when they have shifted to moral spheres of action, and when the strings are being pulled by the astute Rodin. Sue detested all Churches and creeds, and satirised the infamous Jesuit con amore. Nor are his pictures so wide of the truth as to be caricatured; but we should have ranked Rodin far higher than we do had we never read Balzac. The schemer is infinitely cunning, but nothing more; and Sue is always more melodramatic than analytical. As for the 'Mysteries of Paris,' it is melodramatic throughout, and consequently a novel of a far more commonplace type. The Maître d'Ecole, La Squelette, and the rest of them, are simply vulgar but singularly atrocious ruffians, who have graduated high in the Parisian schools of criminality. And Sue set the example to some of our own lady novelists, in never hesitating as to being sensational at the cost of possibilities. Rudolf, the disguised Duke of Gerolstein, is the prototype of the Guardsmen who train upon curaçoa and cigars and sleepless nights for feats of incredible strength and skill. Rudolf, who is of feminine and slender physique, and drinks himself stupid on the vilest liquor in the Assomoirs, "rinses out" the terrible Chourineur with a shower of blows when he has caught the head of the Hercules in chancery; and knocks the still more formidable schoolmaster out of time with a couple of hits put in from the shoulder. Sue flies even more recklessly in the face of credibilities when he restores the long-lost Princess Marie to her father, as pure in mind as if she had never served an apprenticeship to the passions of the vilest ruffians of the banlieu.

      Sue simply described criminals and their haunts, or imagined them as they might have been: he never laid himself out to propound criminal problems for the solution of ingenious and ambitious detectives. It was reserved for Gaboriau to strike out the new line which has been followed since he wrote 'L'Affaire Lerouge' by hundreds of his countrymen and of ours. He elaborated, if he did not invent, the romance which turns entirely on the detection of a crime. He glorifies and idealises the exploits of the élite of the handful of men who control the dangerous masses of Paris. If he is not incapable of the delineation of character — like Boisgobey, his most promising pupil — he is quite indifferent to it. The natures and temperaments of his heroes, as originally indicated, are continually contradicting themselves. He has his heroines; he is fond of arranging unequal marriages; he introduces love-affairs, but they only lead up to striking situations, and the sentimentalism and the pathos are alike fictitious. On the other hand, there are no inconsistencies in the careful construction of the plot. From the first to the final chapter it works smoothly and without a hitch. En passant, or incidentally, he lays himself out to explain away whatever seems improbable and incredible. He is inspired by the veritable genius of the detective business, and his superiority in his special department is undeniable. At the same time, he has his invariable "system," like his heroes of the Rue Jerusalem; and when we come to understand it, his successful ingenuity is less astonishing than it appears at first sight. He always works backwards: he argues backwards from prearranged and established facts; and his infallible seers, with their instinctive flair, interpret to the ignorant the signs that are clear to them. Consequently his Père Tabaret and his Monsieur Lecoq are pure creations of the fancy, parading an intelligence they do not really possess. None the less do they serve his purpose and ours, inasmuch as we credit them with gifts approaching the miraculous. We are brought to share the blind confidence of the Père Absinthe, who, dazzled by the clairvoyance of his clever young colleague Lecoq, asks, with the best faith in the world, what the people they had been tracking said to each other.

      The personages of Gaboriau's mises-en-scène are generally much the same. There is the "suspect" entangled in advance in the meshes of circumstantial evidence; there is a skulking somebody else whom sooner or later we begin to fancy may have had much to say to the atrocity; there is the juge d'instruction, always of rare sagacity, though he changes nature and methods in the different books; and there is the shrewd but kindly old surgeon, of rough or forbidding manners, who is told off for the autopsy of the corpse, and whose experience draws invaluable deductions. Above all, there is the brilliant detective, who, by the light of intuitive perception, follows out his profession as a science. He is an enthusiast, of course, whether he has taken to the pursuit in his ripe maturity like Tabaret, or in his boiling and ambitious jeunesse like Lecoq, who builds his hopes of fortune on the favour of the Prefecture. They are enthusiasts to the point that old Tabaret compromises his reputation without regret, keeping the most irregular hours; while young Lecoq is ready to sell a masure belonging to him, that he may take his revenge on the subtle and mysterious Mai who has befooled him on several occasions at their game of blind-man's-buff. Those enthusiasts always go in terror of their lives — for sundry convicts have sworn to slay them on their return from Cayenne, or their dismissal from forced works at Melun or Fontrevault. No wonder the criminals they have hunted down owe them a bitter grudge, for the concentrated zeal they bring to the chase seems beyond the limits of fair professional business. The Josephs Coutouriers and the other chevaux de rétour have no such feeling towards "the general," who represents the good old school of gens d'armes, although Gevrol is rough-handed and sufficiently keen. And they may well dread the instinctive astuteness of "ce diable de Tabaret," the more so that they are not in the secrets of M. Gaboriau's manner of workmanship. Take that scene at the first "instruction" of the Affaire Lerouge in the cottage where the woman has been murdered. Tabaret astounds even the judge and the commissary by the exact description he gives of the unknown murderer. He describes his height, his hat, his paletot, his cigar, and the amber mouthpiece of his cigar-holder. Had a Tabaret really evolved the personality, and clothed and equipped it from almost imperceptible indications, he might have ranked in more prosaic romance with the Joseph Balsamo of Dumas. As it is, we are bound to remember that it is a case like Lecoq's deductions at the Poivrière of those who hide knowing where to seek. Nothing shows more the extreme care of Gaboriau's workmanship than his development of the "systems" he attributes to the Tabarets and Lecoqs. In the reflection in the fiction of the imaginary facts, the whole fabric is based on logical deduction; the minutest details must be mutually self-supporting; and the demonstration of some insignificant flaw involves the collapse of the entire structure. The demonstration of one of these mathematical problems is worked out indirectly when Tabaret throws up his hands in remorseful horror at the Vicomte de Caumarin, who is charged with an atrocious murder, but is not provided with an irrefutable alibi. Otherwise the circumstantial evidence is complete; but that fundamental omission is sufficient to invalidate it, and Tabaret is in despair because the prosecutors, clinging to the ideas he has been labouring assiduously to drive into their heads, are bent upon sending an innocent man to the guillotine. For of course the favourite trick of the criminal novelist is to send suspicion running on a false trail, as in the case of de Caumarin, or in that of Prosper Bertomy in the 'Dossier, No. 113.' Then some detective of transcendental intelligence comes to the rescue, and the mining and countermining go briskly forward.

      We remarked on the conditions of modern Parisian life, because they give the French novel-wright exceptional advantages. When Governments are corrupt and morals exceptionally lax, adventurers who have enriched themselves, and even men in high station, must have discreditable secrets they are eager to conceal. So the discovery and the trading upon them — in other words, la chantage — becomes a regular business. It has its risks in the shape of long sentences with hard labour, but it is extremely lucrative. No doubt Gaboriau and his imitators have exaggerated; but there is no smoke without fire, and we cannot doubt that there were many penetrable secrets which, in the jargon of criminal fiction, "are well worth a farm in Brie." It would sound ludicrously improbable to charge Lord Salisbury, or the President of his Board of Works, with sharing by arrangement in the profits of swindling contractors. But we know there were ministers of the Second Empire and the Republic who freely indulged themselves in pots de vin, and never quenched their insatiable greed. Troublesome enemies were sent summarily to Cayenne or New Caledonia, and there were still darker stories tolerably well authenticated. As for domestic scandals, they abounded: we have it on the official evidence of the tribunals. Darkening the colours and accentuating details, Gaboriau has turned chantage to excellent purpose. The most thrilling sensations of 'Le Dossier No. 113' depend upon it; and still more exciting is 'La Corde au Cou,' of which chantage is the theme, as it supplies the title. We follow with sympathy and indignation each new pressure of the cord, as a turn of the operator's wrist intensifies the torture. We know that the victim must live on and endure; he can never find a refuge in suicide and repose in the Morgue, since his miseries are to end in a blissful dénouement. But those novels on chantage remind us of Gaboriau's worst fault as a story-teller. Explaining the source of the secrets and it is the same, though in a lesser degree, with his mysterious murders — he wearies us with interminable and explanatory digressions. As a clever artist he must have known it was a mistake: we can only suppose that the method paid him. An innocent suspect is under lock and key: the real offender begins to have good cause to tremble, and our interest is being wrought up to the highest pitch, when, with the "crak-crak" of some chorus in a vaudeville, a dramatic chapter closes, and in commencing the next we are stagnating in the back-waters of some episode of family history which came off in the provinces forty years before. On the whole, we prefer the plan of 'Monsieur Lecoq,' which devotes an entire volume to the crime, and the second and succeeding volume to its causes. Perhaps for that reason we rank the short and unpretentious 'Petit Vieux des Batignolles' among the very best of Gaboriau's books. It goes straight to the point, and is all to the purpose. And the culmination is not unworthy of that brilliantly condensed bit of workmanship, when the murderer is ineffably disgusted at his genius having been misunderstood. He had operated in the knowledge that his victim was left-handed, and the detectives would never have hunted him down, had they not — turning from the false trail — gone blundering in discreditable ignorance of the fact.

      As for Boisgobey, it is difficult to deal with him without doing him injustice. He is the pupil, and seems in most respects the mere copyist, of Gaboriau. We know not what we might have thought of him had not Gaboriau preceded him. He has originality and force, and wonderful gifts of facile composition and construction. In fact he is infinitely the more fertile of the two; indeed his fertility appeared inexhaustible, and he was in the habit of throwing off two or three novels in the year. His plots must have come rather from inspiration than slow thought, yet though some of his stories were better than others, very few of them fell far short of a satisfactory average. He was labouring hard to make hay while the sun shone, and he never let his fancy lie fallow for a moment. Latterly his plots have necessarily been weaker, and he would seem at length to have recognised that. At least, 'Le Fils de Plongeur,' which appeared the other day, is a mere tale of vicious Parisian society, and decidedly a very feeble production. He is at his best in the 'Crime de l'Opera,' which is really masterly in the way the mystery is maintained to the last. Had we not gone on M. Lecoq's plan of rejecting probabilities, and suspecting the lady who seemed altogether superior to suspicion, we should never have guessed the solution till we had reached the last chapters. And yet her guilt is duly brought home without doing any violence to our intelligence. One thing goes far to explain Boisgobey's greater fertility. He takes more licence in the way of character, or rather in the range of social position, than Gaboriau. When a Duc de Sairmeuse or a Duc de Champdocé gets mixed up in shady or criminal transactions, the probabilities must be artistically safeguarded on all sides. Boisgobey, by predilection, takes us into a world on the Bourse and the Boulevards, — a sort of Bohemian Debatable Land, remote from the bourgeois respectability of the Marais, and still farther removed from the Faubourg St Germain. There is no lack of factitious and ephemeral wealth, any more than of indebted and reckless poverty. But the wealth belongs to tainted capitalists, to Russian princes and Roumanian boyars of semi-savage manners and suspected antecedents; to South American proprietors of silver-mines and countless flocks and herds, who take palaces in the Champs Elysées for the season, and launch promising lorettes in landaus with "eight springs." With these are mixed up gay young Parisians or provincials squandering their patrimonies, and officers on long leave from Algiers, dissipating with selfish frugality the arrears of their pay. The ladies, although some of them have high-sounding titles and handsome jointures, belong, with rare exceptions, to the world of immoral adventure. These foreign gentlemen, if they do not wear "sinister expressions," are generally "unsympathetic," and of course are capable of any crime. We are shocked but not astounded at a Tartar autocrat forgetting his geography, and executing an act of summary justice behind walls and grilles near the Parc de Monceau, as if he had been among his serfs and his servile tribesmen on his native steppes. We consider it a strong situation, but little more, when a cosmopolitan speculator, on the eve of quitting the capital, consigns a corpse in a coffin-shaped strong-box to the compartment he has hired in the premises of a Parisian safe company. So the ladies who seek to outshine the "horizontals" by their costly eccentricities have pretty nearly carte blanche. It is a mere mischance that leads to detection, even when one of them makes a special journey to Brittany to sink the missing head of her soubrette, whose body the police are seeking to identify. Then Boisgobey's dissipated but comparatively decent heroes are always, and not unnaturally, compromising themselves in very awkward fashion. They turn night into day, and keep the most execrable company. When not established in apartments, they have their rooms at the Grand Hotel or the Continental. A wetting serves for an introduction, especially when the stranger is of the softer sex, and slight acquaintance changes quickly to comparative intimacy. As they drink freely at déjeûner, dinner, and supper, they are always open to insinuating proposals or advances. The morning may bring reflection and much anxiety: the one and the other are too late. The awkward interview with the commissary of police is sure to come sooner or later; the silken meshes that have insensibly entangled the victim seem strong in the eyes of justice as links of steel. It is too late for satisfactory exculpation, and silence appears less dangerous than compromising avowals. M. Boisgobey's happiest hunting-grounds are the clubs — not exactly tripots, as he is careful to explain, but establishments virtually as disreputable. There is no difficulty in obtaining admission — election follows immediately on proposal. Those sumptuous haunts of the vicious only begin to fill towards the dinner-hour, and the serious business commences about midnight. The bank at baccarat is put up to auction; the parties who lose more money than they can afford are apt to lose their heads as well, and commit themselves to all manner of follies. That is the moment when the Mephistopheles of the novel sees his chance. For a time he is safe to carry everything before him, though in the end he will be run through the body if he does not put a pistol to his brain. When the sensations are at an end, all is over. Boisgobey and his confrères have an unworkmanlike habit of huddling up their stage business at the last; though, indeed, it is but the frank recognition of the truth that they have scarcely attempted to interest us otherwise than melodramatically.

      About ten years ago, another French writer made a brilliant but brief appearance. M. Constant Geroult was the author of 'Le Drame de la Rue du Temple,' which he followed up by 'La Bande a Fifi Vollard.' Both were extremely clever in their genre, although the soul-stirring situations which succeed each other so quickly were inevitably sometimes extravagant and far-fetched. A band of criminals of the worst and most dangerous kind play a running game, in which lives are the stakes on both sides, with a party of picked agents of the police, through the most infamous quarters of Paris and the banlieu. They are collared at last, one by one, and duly convicted and condemned. They have to contend against treachery as well as the police; but the weakness of the story is, that the actual actors in "the drama" should have kept their secrets at all, considering how many were taken into their confidence. On the other hand, and it makes these stories doubly worth noting, M. Geroult takes a new and original departure. He admits his readers to the fullest confidence from the first: we know exactly how and by whom the murder was perpetrated; and nevertheless, and partly on that account, the interest is admirably sustained throughout.

      The criminal romance, properly so called, is of comparatively recent introduction in England. All things considered, our novelists have done fairly well, but they are heavily handicapped. London is a more prosaic if not a more moral capital than Paris. We know nothing of revolutions or émeutes, of fighting behind barricades or the pillaging of palaces — of convulsions, in short, which mean the subversion of society. Secret associations of stealthy conspirators have never flourished even in the back streets between Soho and Leicester Squares. We have no carrières d'Amérique where groups of ruthless ruffians make their lair; nor stretches of suburban wilderness with night-houses like La Poivrière, where even the patrols of the constabulary go in terror of their lives. En revanche, our police and our worthy metropolitan magistrates drop heavily down upon gambling dens of all kinds. Our aristocrats must give swing to their vices within strictly limited spheres, and they are generally protected by the prejudices of their birth, breeding, and associations from the adventurers who appear to get a comfortable living out of the Parisian jeunesse dorée. Scott, in his 'Fortunes of Nigel,' dealt with criminal scenes and characters with his own unrivalled vividness of portraiture. Nothing can be more thrillingly dramatic than the drop from the precincts of the learned Temple, where law and order should have sat enthroned, into the sad and sombre realms of old night and social chaos in Alsatia, enveloped in moral and material miasma. Nothing can be more admirably picturesque than the various types of skulking rascality — the drunken Duke Hildebrod, the spectre-like usurer, and the Copper Captain, whose sword is at the service of anybody so long as he can save his cowardly carcase. But the crime is all above-board; and the murder of Trapbois, and the little arrangement which wreaks heaven's vengeance on the satanic Dalgarno, are merely brought in incidentally and episodically. Talking of Alsatia, by the way, we remember a novel called 'Whitefriars,' noticed rather favourably by Christopher North in the 'Noctes,' which charmed us much in the days of our boyhood. But although it brought in Colonel Blood and Claude Duval, though it was steeped in gore through successive chapters in which crime and infamy stalked unabashed, a similar criticism will apply to that. So with Bulwer's 'Paul Clifford,' and with his 'Pelham.' In one and the other we are introduced to the vilest company — to thieves' cribs, to boozing kens, to houses of call for burglars, to ill-famed taverns on lonely heaths where gentlemen in black-crape visors stabled their well-bred roadsters, and where everybody, from the landlord to the ostler, was in league with them. But the interest of these novels of Bulwer's is sentimental; and though Paul risks the gallows when he stops a post-chaise, there is no attempt to excite us over his ultimate fate, — just as the often-told tale of 'Eugene Aram' resolves itself into a study of character.

      As for Harrison Ainsworth, when he is not melodramatic, as among the gipsies and grim old sextons of 'Rockwood,' and the ladies of noble birth who have married far beneath them and gone to the bad, he romances in realistic fashion on the records of the Newgate Calendar, and glorifies crime when wedded to courage. There is nothing secretly mysterious about the proceedings of the manly Turpin, who revives the chivalry of the middle ages on the ill-made roads of the eighteenth century, and wears his disguises so carelessly that he almost challenges arrest. Our hearts throb in sympathy when the sublime resolution of the ride from Highgate to York fires the imagination of the bold highwayman. The chivalrous Turpin has discounted death, and with pistols in his holsters and a hanger by his side, we know he will not stick at a trifle should he be cornered by the whole posse comitatus. But Dick is no sneaking assassin: he rejects the tempting offers of Lady Rockwood, and is quite incapable of mixing himself up in the affaires tenebreuses that are the favourite subjects of Boisgobey. So with Jack Sheppard. The pride of all British cracksmen, past, present, and to come, has reduced the practice of burglary to a fine art. He sets the best of the Bow Street officers at defiance, plays fast and loose with the terrible Jonathan Wild, and, till he tries the perilous game once too often, is assured that no English jail will hold him. But Jack is straightforward to quixotic folly in all his questionable dealings, and risks his neck repeatedly in the sublimity of self-sacrifice to do a service to his old friend Darrell.

      Dickens seems to have imitated Ainsworth in the criminal scenes of 'Oliver Twist,' but with a lighter and more discriminating touch. There is individuality in the ruffianly Sikes, with all his fierce brutality, and still more in the venerable Fagin and the pickpockets trained in his Academy. Whether the Rembrandt-like drawing of the old Jew in the condemned cell suggested the story, as George Cruikshank asserted, few are likely to forget it. It is the embodiment of selfish and abject terror dissociated from any touch of genuine remorse. The rat is trapped; but were he to slip through his captor's fingers and escape from the black shadows of a fearful futurity, he would rush back to his old haunts and habits. In his sketches of the most vicious society of the lowest London, Dickens sentimentalised and idealised. His thieves' paramours in especial, with their bright gleams of fine feeling and their inclinations towards the virtue of which they were pitifully ignorant, are sheer impossibilities. But in 'Oliver Twist' Dickens gave a graphic picture of the old Bow Street runners, and he threw all his humour into the dialogue when they discuss the "crack" of the crib down at Chertsey. Borrow, by the way, sketched them even more dramatically in his 'Lavengro,' somewhat in the style of Salvator Rosa, when Mr Petulengro recalls his reminiscences of the night-ambush and the death-grapple, as the Bow Street engro dropped from the boughs over the gate on to the shoulders of Jasper's formidable companion.

      Though not the clever fellows they thought themselves, and though we fear they never scrupled to take bribes on occasion, Townsend and his fellow "red-breasts" did good service in their day. But as civilisation advanced, as society became more refined, and crime in consequence became more scientific, they retired in favour of the modern detective. The Bow Street man was advertised by his scarlet waistcoat, as the bloodhound runs an open scent with jingling bells on the collar, so that there was no mistaking his presence or misunderstanding his movements. The new detective was supposed to have the art of disguising his identity and of playing any possible variety of parts with the versatility of an accomplished actor. They suited Dickens better than the rough thief-takers of the old school: he saw his opportunity, and he used it. He cultivated their society; he accompanied them in their nocturnal strolls; he drew them out and listened to their reminiscences and words of wisdom. They on their side were frank and unreserved; we dare to say they sometimes indulged their fancies. They had found a Homer to celebrate their Ulysses — like exploits in prose epics, and were proportionately proud. Dickens used them first in some excellent short tales in 'Household Words.' "That be d⸺d," we remember, was the involuntary tribute paid to the sagacity of a certain sergeant of the force by a certain Tally-ho Thompson, when he understood how he had been followed up and run down in a clever paper-chase of feigned correspondence. Later the shrewdest intelligence of "the Yard" was incarnated in the portly personality of Inspector Bucket, with his eloquently expressive forefinger. He is said to have been closely copied from the life, yet Dickens evidently breathed much of his own buoyant humour into him — as, for example, when he conducts the conversation with good old Grandfather Smallweed in the stately presence of "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet." Be that as it may, Bucket is the ideal detective of the best fiction — fertile in invention, ready of resource, and prompt of decision in moments of emergency, as when he wheeled about in the chaise with his smoking posters, when following the disguised Lady Dedlock towards the North. It is a highly probable touch, too, in the zealous professional, when he claps the handcuffs on his good friend George, whom he really likes and scarcely believes guilty. He makes a candid appeal to the soldier's common-sense. "On all of which accounts I should hope it was clear to you that I must have you, and that I'm damned if I don't have you."

      For ingenious subtlety of intricate plot, for the artful dovetailing of innumerable and seemingly insignificant details, Wilkie Collins is the English Gaboriau and something more. His deliberate action is made to depend upon revelations of individual characters and temperaments, and he has struck out at least one personality that is likely to be immortal. He is an unequal writer, and considering the "scourging" kind of work he undertook, it is not unnatural that his imagination latterly showed signs of exhaustion. The 'Daughter of Jezebel' was among the most sensational of his comparatively recent novels, but it was somewhat coarsely melodramatic. 'Armidale,' for which, as we believe, he got a very long price from the publishers of the 'Cornhill,' is thrilling enough throughout, and in some of the scenes he almost excels himself; but it trenches too freely on the transcendental for satisfactory credibility. His most perfect novel, to our mind, is the 'Moonstone,' which is rather founded on the suspicions of a crime than a criminal romance in itself, although the high-caste zealots, charged with the recovery of the sacred gem, have cast all moral scruples to the wind, and are ready as a matter of religious duty to perpetrate any number of murders. But the 'Woman in White,' by which he made his great reputation as a sensationalist, recommended itself more generally to the popular taste. The mystery was kept up wonderfully cleverly, but we have always thought the somewhat commonplace solution and dénouement unworthy of his brilliant though painstaking preliminaries. Nevertheless the novel would have deserved the best that has been said of it, had it been only for the creation of Miss Halford and of Count Fosco. We should have thought Marion Halford even more admirable, had she not been brought continually in contact with the masterly conception of the Count. Yet the combatants are not unequally matched, and we follow the battle between guile and honesty, with its shifts and surprises and changing fortunes, with ever-increasing interest. We admire Miss Halford's resolution the more, that the Count stands out to her more and more clearly as what he is represented, the sublimed concentration of infernal astuteness. He would have been about the most satisfactory embodiment of Satan we know in our fiction, had it not been for certain redeeming touches which lower him towards our common humanity. We do not mean his fondness for his pet canaries, or his amiable weakness for sweets and pastry. But he is capable of genuinely warm appreciation of Marion's courageous self-sacrifice when she is crossing his best-made plans, and menacing him with exposure. She must be crushed, of course, in the way of business; yet he would willingly spare her, could he reconcile it with his schemes. It is evidence of Wilkie Collins's genius in his particular line that his novels should have been so popular though he weighted them heavily. Nothing could be more irritating or more absurd than his habit of having everything set down categorically in writing. Servants and other uneducated persons, little addicted to literary pursuits, keep regular diaries in the pantry or cottage, and write long-winded letters of interminable length in impossible circumstances. If he can work out a finished study like Fosco, he can sink in the same book to the bathos of the exaggerated affectations of Mr Fairlie; and though it is a minor matter, no writer, not even excepting Anthony Trollope, is more addicted to mannerisms of thought as well as style. And to sum up the defects which counterbalance his rare qualities, his humour is forced, artificial, and far-fetched; although, when we had to mourn his loss the other day, some zealous friends thought it discreet to single out his humour for special commendation.

      Mrs Gaskell has a good murder in 'Mary Barton,' which lends itself to powerful and pathetic situations. The honest workman, driven to despair by his troubles, who is told off by the lot to shoot an execrated employer of labour, is haunted forthwith by the Furies, and worried by the pangs of an undying remorse. The gallows would come to him as a relief, and in some sense as an absolution. There is no more impressive story arising out of the social miseries, which Disraeli describes so graphically in 'Sybil' and elsewhere. Thinking of the arbitrary authority abused by trades-unions, we are reminded of 'Put Yourself in his Place,' suggested to Charles Reade by the official inquiry into the atrocious Sheffield outrages. But there the interest had been anticipated in parliamentary reports: the fiction could hardly improve upon the facts. 'Foul Play' is a more finished and more original production, where the ship is scuttled in the Pacific for the sake of the insurance money, and where a weak but warm-hearted man is heavily punished for one cowardly act of guilt committed on inadequate temptation. The young merchant, in striking his moral balance-sheet, must have bitterly regretted the impulsive precipitation which mistook a mole-hill for a mountain, and resorted unnecessarily to the grands moyens. We need say nothing of 'Never too Late to Mend,' which everybody ought to have enjoyed and read more than once, and in which the reformed London thief becomes the uncompromising "beak" of the Victoria gold-diggings.

      There is a good deal of cleverly devised crime in the innumerable novels of Mrs Henry Wood, but it is generally made subsidiary to the principal motif. Nothing did her greater credit than 'East Lynne,' since the plot revolved round a practical impossibility, and nevertheless the novel was phenomenally popular. But there the main interest is considerably helped by the suspicion of a murder he never committed, which shadows that feeble-minded character young Hare. 'Verner's Pride' is one of her poorest stories, and is disfigured besides by the vulgar extravagances of one of the most vulgar old women she ever drew, which is saying a great deal. But that book is saved by a mysterious murder, which, according to all seeming probabilities, must have been a fratricide; and in many another story she shows an extremely ingenious knack of blending crime with an eerie infusion of the supernatural. There is nothing more enjoyable than a criminal case where ghosts or spirits ought to be called into court, if the bench could only bind them over to give evidence. But Mrs Wood was never in happier vein than when she wrote us 'Johnny Ludlow'; and such short stories as 'Hester Reed's Pills' or 'Lost in the Post' may be designated paradoxically as delightful idylls of folly or sin in peaceful rural communities.

      Miss Braddon is one of those enviable authors who write with a ready and facile pen, and whose fancy within its limits seems seldom to fail them. She has written far longer than M. Boisgobey, and her books have been thrown off with nearly equal regularity and profusion. Hers is by no means a high order of art, but, nevertheless, there is much to admire in it. She tells a wonderful tale with an apparently unaffected air of simplicity, and she succeeds in interesting us in persons whom we know to be moral monstrosities. It is curious to look back to her first novel, 'The Trail of the Serpent.' We do not know in what probably obscure periodical it appeared, nor did it deserve to attract much attention. But in the preface to a later edition she says she regards it with some pride, and, from the point of view of her prospects, the pride was justifiable. It abounds in absurdities; the English is often slipshod; but it shows all the signs of a redundant imagination, and is overcrowded with suggestive incidents. With experience, of course, she became more economical of sensation, and much to the advantage of her books. She came quickly to understand artistic perspective, and learned to concentrate care and attention on the little group in the foreground. It can never be said of Miss Braddon that she has a novel without a hero — or a heroine. She has been in the habit of designating herself as the author of 'Lady Audley's Secret'; and that is perhaps the most characteristic of her books, as her ladyship is the most infernal of her heroines. A female monster is no novelty in criminal fiction, but in some sense Lady Audley is original. In many respects she reminds us of "Miladi" in Dumas' 'Musketeers,' and possibly Miladi may have given the hint for her. Both are beautiful; both are hell-born actresses; in both the delicate body is animated by the diabolical will; both are gifted by nature with the rare personal charms which can wear an air of the most winning and candid simplicity. But in the French murderess the evil spirit is actively malignant; she has an irrepressible craving for infernal excitements, and a life of tranquil luxury would be vapid misery to her. It is very different with the fair young Englishwoman. She is the victim of those circumstances which disturb depths of depravity in her which might otherwise have slumbered unsuspected by herself. Had the worthy old baronet married the governess without a secret, she might possibly have made him an excellent wife. She would have been languidly grateful for all the good things he bestowed upon her; she would have dressed to perfection, bedecked herself with jewels, and done her duty in the station to which she was called. She would have valued that station too much to risk it rashly; and she would have been all the more likely to be faithful to her marriage vow, that her temperament was as chilly as her brain was calculating. Her crimes came of deliberate calculation. When her first husband turns up to convict her of bigamy, in her prudent respect for the law she would gladly elude him by a supercherie. She tries the plan of a feigned death and burial. That fails: the meddlesome idiot, unfortunately for himself, is inspired by a veritable passion; and Providence brings him down to her noble new home in the eastern counties. He must go or else be removed there is no other alternative. So when things have come to a crisis, she cuts short an angry altercation by dropping him down the old well in the gloomy shrubbery. Tant pis pour lui, is her reflection; and if the secret were between the well and the shrubs and herself, it would scarcely trouble her, for she has no conscience. Fortunately, however, for the readers of the novel, both before the death of her husband and after she is living in continual terror of being found out, and sticks at nothing to avoid detection. Nor can any one deny that Nemesis has pretty well wiped out the arrears against her, when that lovely and energetic and pleasure-loving young woman is locked up in the private asylum at Villebrumeuse, by an arbitrary exercise of domestic justice. In so far she and Miladi are disposed of in a similar manner. Even Miss Braddon could not keep up a quick succession of such highly spiced fictions as 'Lady Audley' and 'Aurora Floyd'; but all her books must be pitched more or less in the same sensational key. They have all the recommendation of being readable, though it is very easy to have a surfeit of them. There is no faltering in the lady's firm touch; and in great matters as in small, she always writes with the serene self-assurance which is one of the secrets of her popularity. Whether she is describing life in a penal settlement at the antipodes, or writing the sanguinary history of the coup d'état in 'Ishmael,' or sending sportsmen out with rifles in September to shoot partridges in the pheasant coverts, we are much inclined to accept all she writes as gospel. If it is not true it ought to be, so great is the air of vraisemblance. Sensational stories, in moderately priced single volumes, are the fashion now, and without satirical intention, we say the shortness is in their favour. Some are as good as Mr Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' or 'Kidnapped'; others are comic and gory burlesques of the better kind of criminal extravaganzas. Considering the difficulty of hitting upon any fancies that are decently fresh, we are bound to say that not a few of them show creditable dexterity and ingenuity. But surely this sensational business must soon come to an end, or be suspended for half a generation or so. The public is getting familiarised with all manner of mysteries, in cabs, in black boxes, in garrets, and in cellars: the detectives have been told off for such intolerably hard duty, that it is clear they must soon strike in disgust, and refuse to lend themselves to those stale combinations; and the pirates, highwaymen, and bushrangers who have been indiscriminately resuscitated will find temporary rest again in their dishonoured graves. The novel-reading public revels in excitements, and is not over-critical; but of sensation, when it has degenerated into melodrama and burlesque, there must surely come satiety at the last.