More suspicion is piled on Charles' absent shoulders until he, too, is found murdered in a river, fished out of the water by a vagabond. Later, Lord Beltham, missing and presumed dead, is found in the abandoned home of Gurn, a mysterious traveller not often seen at his home. A conversation - witty, calm, urbane, intelligent, menacing - ensues. Suddenly a man grips her arm, covers her mouth with his hand. Princess Sonia, 'not pretty but lovely,’ is bathing in a hotel room, alone. The breadth and depth of the wound absolutely prove that it was not made with one stroke the murderer must have gone amok and dealt several blows.’ Suspicion is placed on the only logical shoulders - Charles. de Langrune's throat was almost entirely severed by the blade of some sharp instrument. In the morning, after he has collected his father from the train station, it is revealed that the Marquise de Langruen has been brutally murdered: 'Mme. Excited by these stories, he sleeps poorly. The evening before his father's arrival, Charles learns the story of Fantômas, a master criminal who may or may not exist, who may or may no longer be active as a killer. Indeed, the antagonist throughout the novel may not even be Fantômas, one of the many strokes of genius in this novel.Ĭharles Rambert waits anxiously to meet his father, whom he has not seen in many years. The plot revolves around the mysterious killer, of whom very little is known at the beginning - and, delightfully, even less is known at the end. Parisian appetite for stories of Fantômas's dastardly deeds was insatiable, 'a work of popular fiction whose popularity cut across all social and cultural strata,’ says John Ashbery, who wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classic edition.įantômas catapulted the genius criminal to stratospheric popularity, as well as all but creating the modern criminal novel. Following this initial massive success, the two would go on to write thirty-one more Fantômas novels, and when Souvestre died, Allain wrote eleven more. Or so Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, partners in writing, would have had the reader believe when they created Fantômas in 1911.

And there are many, many stories of Fantômas.

He can pretend to be anyone - even female - or so the story goes. He is a master killer, a criminal genius, capable of being in multiple places at once. Book review: Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's *Fantomas*įantômas is everywhere.

Allain souvestre