Boisgobey

Boisgobey, FORTUNÉ DU, a French novelist, was born in 1824 at Granville in Normandy, and died 26th February 1891. After several campaigns in Algeria as army-paymaster, he made his first appeal to the public in 1868, with a story in the pages of the Petit Journal. It was followed in quick succession by a crowd of sensational stories which soon gained a certain popularity even in England, spite of the exceptionally poor quality of the current translations. A close follower of Gaboriau, he has all his master's vigour and ingenuity, but lacks that sense of dramatic fitness and respect for verisimilitude which saved the original from the impossible absurdities of the imitations. But lovers of 'police-novels' are not exacting in literary workmanship, and Du Boisgobey's stories are at least always readable. Among the best are L'Homme sans Nom (1872), Le Forçat Colonel (1872), L'As de Cœur (1875), Les Mystères de Nouveau Paris (1876), Le Crime de l'Opéra (1880), and Le Secret de Berthe (1884). Some twenty of them have been translated.