It's a great instance of early "detective" novels (or I'd call them more aptly police novels, since the idea of the gumshoe hadn't really developed yet!) since you can see the slow move from urban bildungsroman to crime mystery.Īnyway, feel free to submit either here or at AskHistorians. northern and western frontiers of the Province of Buenos Aires' and that in 1874 at the age of 41 he was killed in one of his country's civil wars when, riding on horseback toward the enemy lines, 'he was struck by two Remington rifle bullets. In the end, the inspector decides to let the man go after having fully understood his motives.
While the first part of the book leads you to condemn the suspect, the second part makes you sympathize with him, and realize that crime is more complicated than just logic and deduction. The novel is split over two parts, the first is a detective story, and the second is a sort of "prequel" that describes how and why the suspect was driven to his crimes. My favorite is Emile Gaboriau's "Monsieur Lecoq," who is a super-perceptive police inspector from the French Second Empire (the book itself was published in 1869). Thought it was an interesting question that our panelists might have an answer to.
This is a cross-post from r/AskHistorians, where a user was wondering why all the detective novels he knows are from Britain.
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