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Portrait image of Émile Gaboriau

Sample of authors

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 ...

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Portrait image of Eliot Pattison Photo: Bill Uhrich/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images (2018)

Sample of authors

Pattison, Eliot

The American author and lawyer, Joseph Eliot Pattison, was born in Philadelphia. He grew up on a farm run by his father; his mother was a bank official. As a child, he devoured books and often disappeared into the forest to read. An aunt who was a librarian in the American army used to supply him with literature from the various countries where she was stationed. Pattison himself says that the...

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