Qui Est?

Fantômas is a crime boss--the crime boss--in pre-WW1 Paris. He is in charge of a vast army of "apaches" (street thugs) and has spies and hirelings everywhere. He himself is a master of disguise and carries out burglaries and murders with abandon and aplomb.

More vividly, his crimes are both appalling and carried out with imagination and verve. Which is not to approve of them, but Fantômas, ruthless and merciless though he is, has a certain audacity and an outrageous style--"spectacularly gruesome," in the words of one critic--that sets him apart from most other villains. He crashes passenger trains and blows up steamships, all to eliminate a single witness. He sends a cab hurtling through the Paris streets, its coachman a wide-eyed corpse.

He puts a rebellious henchman in a large bell in place of its clapper, and when the time comes to ring the hour the man's blood, along with his stolen gems, rain down on the public. Fantômas' masked henchmen crash a city bus into a bank in order to gain access to the vault. Fantômas replaces the perfume in the dispensers of a department store with sulfuric acid; he releases plague-carrying rats onto a passenger liner; he places a victim face-up in a guillotine, so that the man can watch his own execution. Fantômas poisons a man so that he can take up with his wife. Fantômas wages war on bourgeois French society, but one gets the feeling that he commits these horrible deeds for the sheer joy of it.

Fantômas is stalked by two men: Inspector Juve of the Sûreté, who is the only policeman who even suspects the extent of Fantômas' power and who is monomaniacal in his pursuit of Fantômas; and Jérôme Fandor, a journalist who may be Fantômas' son. Fantômas is aided by Hélène, his daughter, an opium-smoking woman who dresses in men's clothing and wears a death's-head tattoo (a classic bad girl born decades too early).

The Fantômas novels were very popular with the French public, acting as an accompaniment to the enthusiasm for the Grand Guignol. The demand was such that his inventors Souvestre and Allain wrote a Fantômas novel a month for 32 straight months, a feat of output rarely matched.

More on Fantômas films, books, and his influence on the Surrealists and other members of the avant garde here: The Fantomas Website.

Comments

[MD]

A novel a month for 32 months? How is this possible? Your post so makes me want to read one of them....