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 police officers in active service, which was rare at the time. 3) He used his legal expertise to build up his plots and portray the work of the police, which lent his stories a touch of realism. 4) He introduced "red herrings", that is to say false clues that are detected by the protagonist, but not by the other characters or the reader.