File No. 113 (Le Dossier)

File No. 113, Adapted from the French by Nina Cooper. Original novel by Emile Gaboriau

Emile Gaboriau is frequently credited with being the creator of the modern detective story. He drew on the 40 years of slow evolution of the crime story, following Edgar Allen Poe in the United States, and writers such as Paul Féval, Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas the elder, and Honoré de Balzac in France, writing popular literature for the masses.

Violence, lies, adultery, duplicity, murder, including fratricide and attempted parricide, falsely exchanged or abandoned sons and stolen birthrights, and ever more sins and villainies, find a place in Gaboriau’s novels, as they do in many contemporary detective stories, television series and often even in real life.

File No. 113 is no exception. On the surface, the crime seems simple. A bank’s secure safe is robbed. One of the two men who holds the key must be guilty. One key-holder is the bank’s owner who lives above the bank with his family, the other is the bank’s trusted manager—a man like a son to the owner.

What if neither is guilty? How did this safe, with every security measure known and employed at the time, get robbed?

Leave it to Monsieur Lecoq of the Sûreté, a policeman of many disguises and much guile to uncover the devastating truth of deceit, betrayal, lies, murder and sordid family histories that lead to the crime.

Nina Cooper holds a Ph. D. in contemporary French literature from the University of Texas at Austin. She has done critical work on the plays of Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on the short stories of Julien Green.

Her first book, Servants on Horses, a novel based on the history of the Muskogees in the American South, was published in 2009.