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Portrait image of Émile Gaboriau

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Gaboriau, Émile

While Edgar Allan Poe, the American author of short stories, is generally considered to be the father of modern crime fiction, Émile Gaboriau has been cited as the father of the crime novel. He was the first to use at least four defining elements of the genre: 1) He wrote briefly and succinctly compared to his contemporaries and his novels are driven by the crime plot. 2) His protagonists are ...

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Literary figures

Elijah Baley

Gender: Male

He is a police officer in New York – in about 3,000 years from now! He is also – as the main character in one of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi detective stories – something of a portal figure for that sub-genre. Elijah Bailey, who can panic because of agoraphobia, lost his mother at an early age, and as a consequence is very caring of his own family, his wife Jezebel, called Jessie, and his son Bentley. A...

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