Just the mention of Paris, known as the City of Light, conjures up visions of frolicking in the Tuileries, strolling along the Seine or sipping champagne on the Champs-Elysées.

But the dark side of Paris has prominence, too: the cemeteries, the catacombs, Lady Diana's crash site. The French, after all, embraced the guillotine and foie-gras-producing gavage.

"The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft and Detection," by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, tours the historic underbelly of the French capital, starting with the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911.

The Hooblers trace back from the theft to 1900 and the beginning of the Belle Epoque in Paris, a time when the city was "confident, prosperous, cultured and creative." Even in those times, Parisians embraced the wild side. For entertainment, they popularized le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, at which spectators ended up sprayed with "blood" after witnessing enactments of murder, rape and torture.

The book contains numerous you-can't-make-this-up tales of turn-of-the-century crime. Francophiles and true-crime lovers will find the book a fascinating read, but it is not for the squeamish.

It shows the development of French crime fighters and their tools, detailing the history of techniques such as Bertillonage and fingerprinting. The writers segue into the lives of Parisian artists, especially Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, both of whom, incredibly, were arrested as suspects in the Mona Lisa heist.

What the reader enters as a crime book eventually ends up providing a fuller picture of turn-of-the-century life and science in Paris. For example, we find out how the development of Cubism is tied to Albert Einstein's "Electrodynamics" paper of 1905. (Einstein said it was impossible for a single observer, standing in a fixed spot, to observe reality. Picasso and Georges Braque tried to depict an object from many points of view at the same time.)

But the book's backbone is unvarnished crime and criminology, taking the reader, for example, into an autopsy performed without aid of refrigeration and latex gloves. Think about it.

From the wildly popular fictional Fantômas, a sociopathic killer, to the origins of the phrase "cherchez la femme" ("Look for the woman"), the Hooblers fill the book with so many tales and facts that it can be hard to track all the characters. At times, it feels a bit long and too much like a textbook, but it's a fulfilling read for those of us who like to stalk the wild side from a cozy armchair, perhaps with a side of pâté.

Rochelle Olson covers Hennepin County Courts. She is at 612-673-1747.