The Crime of Orcival

Gaboriau, Emile, 1832-1873Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.9
Word count
707K words
Chapters
71

Tags

Mystery and Suspense Foreign Literature Justice and ClassSuspense ThrillerLegal LabyrinthInheritance DisputePlot TwistsCriminal PsychologyClass PerspectiveDetective FictionDeduction ProcessFrench Literature

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Le crime d'Orcival by Emile GaboriauAuthor: Gaboriau, Emile, 1832-1873,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jan 7, 2014

Editor's review

Le crime d'Orcival is a pivotal full-length novel in Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq series, centering on a murder in the village of Orcival and gradually uncovering the secrets and conflicting interests of an aristocratic family. Gaboriau is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern detective fiction, and his detective Lecoq excels at meticulous evidence-gathering and psychological deduction; this book is a concentrated showcase of that method. The plot advances through contradictions in testimony, details from the crime scene, and character motives, with a clear chain of reasoning and the density of a social panorama. This is a public-domain ebook of the original French text, suitable as French reading material and for historians of detective fiction comparing the formal features of early detective narrative. Readers should attend to the narrative pacing and the depiction of nineteenth-century French judicial procedure, details that give the work its period texture.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the opening crime scene and preliminary investigation, noting character relationships and the timeline, then move into the middle section of deduction.
  2. When reading in French, prepare a vocabulary list and focus on terms for judicial matters, rural life, and forms of address.
  3. After finishing, revisit the key testimony passages to check whether the detective's reasoning is consistent with the clues.
  4. Read alongside other works in the same author's Lecoq series to observe continuities and changes in his narrative technique.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this book the original French text, and what language level is needed? According to the available information, the book is in French and is a public-domain ebook. At least intermediate French reading ability is recommended, sufficient to handle long-form narrative and dialogue; beginners may first read a translation or read bilingually before attempting the original.
Can I read this directly without having read other works in the Lecoq series? Yes. The story is relatively self-contained, with its core case and investigation standing on their own; however, knowing the basic setup of the Lecoq character will make it easier to appreciate the distinctive features of his investigative method.
Where does the electronic edition of this book come from, and is it reliable? The information indicates it was released by Project Gutenberg, a platform known for providing public-domain ebooks. This is a French-language edition of a public-domain work, suitable for reading and research; for specifics of typesetting and annotation, refer to the actual file.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Gaboriau, Emile, 1832-1873 Author

Emile Gaboriau (1832–1873) was a French writer best known for his detective fiction. The collection contains 32 of his works, including the two-volume Monsieur Lecoq, Le crime d'Orcival, and L'affaire Lerouge. These works generally center on investigation and detection, with tightly linked plots that emphasize criminal reasoning and character portrayal, and they hold a certain place in the development of early detective fiction. His style is marked by suspense and logical deduction, often revealing the truth layer by layer through the eyes of a detective, and it has inspired later works in the same genre. Due to limited public information, details of his life and writing background remain unclear, and the present introduction relies mainly on the works themselves and general literary-historical knowledge.