THE WIDOW LEROUGE THE LEROUGE CASE: The Widow Lerouge's Contribution to Detective, Crime, and Murder Mystery Books

This book was an important contribution to the development of the genre of detective, crime, and murder mystery books. In it, we see some themes that influenced later writers, among them:

   Good characterization and human description of people's motives.

   Literary references to the Bible (Samson and Delilah), allusions to classic literature, including references to the sword of Damocles, Hercules, Plutarch, Rome, and Sparta.

   Rivalry with the official police force (although they are not portrayed as stupid).

   Tabaret comes to realize that a police official named Gevrol is more clever than he at first appears.

   The perpetrator plants false clues to throw the police off the track.

   A man falsely accused of a crime suffers a miscarriage of justice.

   The detective (Tabaret) who has proven the case changes his mind, later decides the alleged perpetrator is innocent, and vows to bring the real criminal to justice.

   At one point, Tabaret regrets "the abolition of torture, the refined cruelty of the middle ages, quartering, the stake, the wheel" and believes "The guillotine was too quick; the condemned man had scarcely time to feel the cold steel cutting through his muscles...." Later, however, he has a change of heart and mind: "The old amateur detective doubted the existences of crime, and believed that the evidence of one's senses proved nothing. He circulated a petition for the abolition of capital punishment, and organized a society for aiding the poor innocent accused."

   "After having believed in the infallibility of justice, he now saw no errors so great as judicial ones."