FRANCE: Gaston Bayle

The best-known policeman in France is dapper, jovial Jean Chiappe, Paris's bowler-hatted Prefect. Last week the second best-known French policeman, meticulous Gaston Edmond Bayle, was shot three times in the back and died instanter.

Called by romantic French reporters Le Grand Inquisiteur, and Le Sherlock Holmes Parisien, M. Bayle played in real life that familiar character of all good murder mysteries, the scientific detective. Appearing seldom in public, he spent all his working hours in his laboratory squinting through microscopes, blinking at sputtering X-ray lamps, scrutinizing bloodstains. Elaborately indexed in his...