FANTOMAS

Rating:
Summary: Fantomas prefigures the post-modern fictions of Borges.
Review: For some reason, Fantomas never figures in the genealogy of the detective story, where Borges, with his 1942 story 'Death and the compass'is credited with completely reversing the traditional elements of detective fiction (crime,investigation,solution, resolution), to create a new post-modern genre, 'anti-detective fiction', followed by Nabakov, Pynchon etc,which is characterised by a lack of or a compromised resolution, an unknowable world (Holmes, Poirot etc. always knew the world they operated in), and a hugely fallible detective who is unable to control the plot, and is usually destroyed by his own detection. Fantomas does all this 30 years earlier. In the first book, we don't even know who Fantomas is - there is enough textual evidence to suggest that he is not Etienne Rambert-Gurn, that we can never know who he is. We have only Juve's word for it, and he is constantly admitting that this may be a figment of his imagination. The form itself is also revolutionary - instead of following a single narrative to its resolution, the narrative is continually splintering, with different stories on the go at once. Juve manages to connect them all to Fantomas, but to accept this is to ignore the special contrapuntal magic of the text, which through repitition, doubling, mirroring, achieves a terrifying loss of control on the part of the reader, who is frequently in the dark as to which character is which. Even if Gurn is Fantomas, the ending is hardly the cosy resolution of Agatha Christie, say. An innocent man is executed, and a homicidal lunatic is on the loose. The predominant motif of the novel is of the theatre, acting, inventing a role - the result being a comprehensive deconstruction of any simplistic, holistic notions of identity, and therefore, perhaps, offering a more liberating way of looking at the world, one which does not depend on repressive dichotomies, such as good and evil. This novel, despite being indifferently written, is a masterpiece, which proves the superior power of the unconscious over the conscious artist.

Rating:
Summary: "Fantomas is alive! They have executed the wrong man!"
Review: The English have their Master Detectives. But the French have Fantomas - Master Criminal! Nowhere in English or American crime novels is there a villain as scary, or as omnipotent as Fantomas. If you're ready for crime novels where the bad guy always wins -- get Fantomas!

The adventures of Fantomas and his 'squeeze', Lady Beltham, were a sensation in France during the first part of the 20th Century. Even though they were just dime novels, great poets like Appollinaire (founder of the "Friends of Fantomas Society"),and artists like Magritte and Juan Gris worshipped this Genius of Crime. These novels, (especially the first one), are intoxicating, gruesome, and permeated with the atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Paris.

Readers of English mysteries might find the plots a bit airy at times, but there are moments of sublime surreal transcendance in each one, that simply cannot be found anywhere else.

One episode finds detective Juve, (Fantomas' nemesis), spying through a looking glass into an apartment he suspects has been visited by Fantomas. (This was Forty years before "Rear Window").

Through his looking glass, he is baffled to observe the lady who lives there, apparently recoiling in horror at her middle-class living room furniture, and leaping to her death onto a Parisian boulevard.(Juve through his telescope, could not see the Boa Constrictor which Fantomas had placed in the room.)

Bad guys dressed as gendarmes, good guys posing as criminals. With each new character, one wonders, "Is this Fantomas, or is it Juve"? And "Where is Lady Beltham"? Everyone is a master of disguise. Nothing is certain -- except that the genius of crime, with his sweet, beautiful English Aristocratic Lady will ultimately triumph in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Super Villain!
Review: This super villain captured the imagination of early 20th century France in a big way. He starred in a long running series of best selling novels that polite society refered to dimissively as "penny dreadfuls". Though considered trash by most educated folks, such fiction was extolled by the French surrealists as great reading. And it is. Look for work as bizarre or well crafted in bookshops today, & you'd be hardpressed to find it's equal.

Rating:
Summary: Terror on the Installment Plan
Review: Who is Fantomas? The Lord of Terror, Emperor of Crime, Genius of Evil. That is to say, a middle-aged businessman, a masked black-tie and tuxedo burglar, an English footsoldier from the Boer wars. In this, the first of 32 sensational crime novels, Fantomas decapitates a marquise, stuffs the corpse of an English lord into a trunk and has an affair with his wife, fleeces a Russian princess, drowns all the passengers on an oceanliner to get rid of an alias, and throws the butler from a speeding train. And he gets away with it all, despite relentless pursuit by the righteous, obsessive, and paranoid Inspector Juve. Unfortunately for you, late 20th-century English reader, Morrow/Ballantine only reissued two novels, both out of print. Curses! I tell you, Fantomas is alive! "His boundless shadow extends / Over Paris and all coasts / What then is this gray-eyed ghost / Whose silence surges within? / Might it be you, Fantomas / Lurking upon the rooftops?" --Robert Desnos, "La Complainte de Fantomas"