THE EXPERIENCES OF A FRENCH DETECTIVE OFFICER "Waters" [William Russell] Genre Fiction

First edition of this classic Victorian detective novel, ostensibly written in the form of a memoir by an expat detective who fled his home country to avoid political persecution. After his RECOLLECTIONS OF A DETECTIVE POLICE-OFFICER (1856), the first novel of its kind to feature an investigator from Scotland Yard, Russell followed-up with this first-person series of eight short stories featuring Detective Duhamel, "who escaped his native France to avoid imprisonment for political reasons" (Dever 234). Detective fiction has always pressed up against the porous borders of that much-derided segment of popular literature now known as "true crime": just as the latter is frequently embellished and distorted for the sake of a better story, crime and detective fiction in its earliest forms borrowed the shock of the real, insisting as a matter of genre convention that the events depicted were only lightly fictionalized, that the reader was given entrée into the "marginalized social space between 'respectable' and 'criminal'" (Saunders) occupied by the real-life police detective; that they were being told a true story by an insider. Verisimilitude was the point: "The genre was designed to take the private spaces, operations and methodologies of the police force, and publicize them for the reader, and Russell himself explained that his memoir writing was designed to present an inside view into policing for readers" (Saunders). To this end, Russell / Duhamel begin the book with an "essay," "The Difference Between English and French Detectives," writing: "It is true they are alike agents of the public force, and that their common mission is to frustrate or detect offenses against the person and against property. But there the resemblance ends [.] Yes, multifarious, all-embracing are the duties of the French Secret Police." Rare; OCLC locates just eight copies. 6.25'' x 4''. Original full purple textured cloth with gilt spine titles. [2], 13-317, [1, publisher's ad] pages (complete). Spine sunned with faint perished label shadow. Minor shelfwear. Overall clean and sound.