Many of du Boisgobey’s novels tend as much toward romance as toward mystery or detective fiction. Some, like Le Bac and Le Crime de l’omnibus intertwine romance and detection so well that one cannot exist without the other. Many of the novels’ plots resemble contemporary soap operas more than genuine detective stories. Titles such as The Felon’s Bequest: A Novel of the Prison and the Boudoir; The Convict Colonel: A Romance; The Sculptor’s Daughter; The Husband and the Diva; The Demi-monde Under the Terror, were some of his most popular novels in the nineteenth century.

Contemporary critics would likely agree with Charles Dickens’ criticism of du Boisgobey’s work:

There is something which we must, some of us, admit, that M. du Boisgobey is, on the whole, amusing. For my part I can forgive a great deal to the man who amuses me. And, unfortunately, there is another thing which we must, some of us admit, that M. du Bosigobey is long. What a sensational novelist that sensational novelist would have been if he had only ‘boiled it down’! Of course, the exigencies of the ‘feuilleton’ method of publication precluded any suicidal tendencies of that description.^[7]

Those following the feuilleton installments of his novels might not have objected to their length, but sometimes found du Boisgobey scandalous. Certainly, he would not be found so in our century. And, although he continued the Lecoq series, he was fundamentally unlike Gaboriau. One of the major differences between them is the social class in which they lived and from which they drew their inspiration. Those following the feuilleton installments of his novels might not have objected to their length, but sometimes found du Boisgobey scandalous. Gaboriau, in his relatively short life, moved around in the police and feuilletonistes working circles: crime and crime scenes, the morgue, the judiciary. Sprinkled throughout his work are satirical comments on the judicial system, the penal system, the double standard in matters of sex, as well as on the pomposity and duplicity of minor government officials. His experience as well as his social and intellectual contacts were more limited than those of du Boisgobey. Wide travel, contact and interaction with international society, intimate friendships and intellectual exchanges with Parisian social and literary contacts provided du Boisgobey with greater insight into social life and problems outside the criminal and judicial worlds. As an intimate friend of Edmond de Goncourt, he interacted closely with the literary elite of the day. Frequently a critic of contemporary social life in France, he noted the inferior position of women even in rich bourgeois families, their unrealistic sexual education prior to marriage, the pretentiousness of the artistic community, as well as of the Parisian and the provincial bourgeois, the strength of gossip, the “qu’en dira-t-on ?” — the worry of what people will say — n the life of the bourgeois, even as he gives a perhaps false and overly sympathetic picture of the aristocracy and Faubourg Saint Germain in Paris.

The tenor of Gaboriau’s work, much of which hinges on some unfortunate love affair or sexual encounter, can be summed up in lines from one of the sixteen-line sonnets of his contemporary, George Meredith, in Modern Love:

while du Boisgobey’s work is best summed up in “The Ballad of the Railway Novels”: