Simon & Schuster digs deep for Catriona Byers’ look at the Paris morgue

A historian’s look at a19th-century Paris morgue in which the unidentified dead were laid out for public view has been snapped up by Simon & Schuster (S&S), followed by a flurry of multi-publisher auctions across Europe.

S&S deputy publisher for non-fiction Kris Doyle bought world rights to Catriona Byers’ Morgue: Death, Tragedy and the Birth of True Crime in Nineteenth-century Paris from Rachel Conway at Georgina Capel Associates.

The S&S rights team has reported a subsequent “fantastic” international response to the book, as heated auctions in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Spain were concluded in the run-up to London Book Fair, with “more to come”. North American rights went to S&S’s Scribner division, acquired by senior vice-president and publisher Nan Graham and executive editor Katie Raissian.  

Byers’ book focuses on 1804 onwards, when Paris’ unidentified dead were displayed at the city morgue. The bodies were laid out in the hope that one of the thousands of visitors might identify them.

Morgue looks at 12 bodies, corresponding to the number of slabs in the display room, and uses them to tell a “gripping and immersive story of a city in turmoil and a society in flux”. Across four themed sections – crime, science, social history and artistic afterlives – Byers offers “a panoramic exploration of topics as diverse as death tourism, the sex trade, surveillance policing, the birth of forensics, the invention of photography and the rise of Gothic literature”.

Byers originally hails from Fife, Scotland, and now lives in Paris. She recently completed her PhD on the Paris and New York City morgues at King’s College London, alongside research projects relating to the “history of crime-scene photography, haunted archives and the redevelopment of American pauper cemeteries”. Byers was also shortlisted for the BBC’s New Generation Thinker 2024 and runs a popular history Instagram account under the handle @heymorguegirl.  

Kris Doyle said: “[Byers] has a deep knowledge of her subject based on years of archival research and a literary felicity that makes her passion for it sparkle on the page. Readers all over the world are in for a treat when they rediscover this extraordinary lost history and its relevance to so much of modern life today, which Cat tells with both storytelling panache and a sensitivity befitting its moral complexity.”