Eyraud and Bompard

From H. B. Irving’s A Book of Remarkable Criminals comes the definitive account of the Eyraud–Bompard affair—one of Paris’s most sensational 1889 murders. When the genial bailiff Gouffe vanishes, a trail of an empty trunk, scorched matches, and a grim discovery near Lyons draws master detective M. Goron into a case that races from Paris to London, New York, Mexico, and Havana. Irving unspools the plot with a storyteller’s snap and a historian’s care: the honey trap in a rented flat, the chilling pulley-and-cord strangulation, Dr. Lacassagne’s forensic breakthrough, and the international manhunt that corners Michel Eyraud after months of brazen cons. At the center stands the mercurial Gabrielle Bompard—vain, quick-witted, and morally unmoored—whose courtroom bid to blame hypnotic suggestion turns the trial into a media storm. Ross Blilie’s clear, atmospheric narration brings to life the investigators, doctors, and lovers locked in a battle of wills, exposing themes of obsession, manipulation, and justice at the dawn of modern criminology. Gripping, shocking, and richly detailed, this is classic true crime told with rare precision and pulse.