Once you grasp the concept you can conjure up unlimited Fantômas adventures.

The text, banal in itself, suggests a thousand potential scenarios of infinite fascination. Just as their malevolent hero-a genius of crime, waging war on bourgeois society-terrifies most surely by his invisibility, the Fantômas novels are more powerful imagined than read. Allain and Souvestre's creation has imposed itself through sheer aura. If the name Fantômas has lingered on in the English-speaking world, it's due largely to the praise lavished by the likes of Apollinaire ('from the imaginative standpoint.one of the richest works that exist'), Cendrars ('the modern Aeneid'), and Cocteau ('absurd and magnificent lyricism'), who elevated a crudely written, wildly plotted, and interminable roman feuilleton into a harbinger of Surrealism. Here is a book as phantasmal as its unseen hero: a legendary crime novel (first of a 32-volume series) unavailable in English for many decades, source of an equally legendary and equally inaccessible silent movie serial by Louis Feuillade. From the Village Voice, August 18, 1986: review of Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, New York: William Morrow, 1986 This volume tells of the daring exploits of Fantômas in his attempts to get possession of the King of Hesse-Weimar's famous diamond.Who Is Fantômas? 'Crime After Crime', by Geoffrey O'Brien. Juve succeeds in defeating his efforts, but the criminal himself escapes once more. Juve tracks the criminal to his secret hiding-place, but Fantômas escapes.įantômas now appears as the representative in Paris of a Foreign Government whose real business is to obtain important military secrets for Germany.

In this continuation Fantômas appears as the leader of a gang of Apaches, and as a physician of standing. Translated from the original French by Cranstoun Metcalfe. The Adventures of Detective Juve in pursuit of a master in crime. Messengers of Evil or The Vengeance of Fantomas (1917) In the history of crime fiction, he represents a transition from Gothic novel villains of the 1800s to modern-day serial killers.Ī French writer mostly remembered today for his co-creation with Pierre Souvestre of the fictional arch-villain and master criminal Fantômas. The character was also the basis of various film, television, and comic book adaptations. One of the most popular characters in the history of French crime fiction, Fantômas was created in 1911 and appeared in a total of 32 volumes written by the two collaborators, then a subsequent 11 volumes written by Allain alone after Souvestre's death.

Allain souvestre