Paul is reading ‘Fantômas’ (1911), the first in a series of 32 books by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain about the adventures of this most famous master criminal. Known as ‘the master of everyone and everything’, Fantômas’s identity remains unknown throughout the series. The extract used below is from Cranstoun Metcalfe’s English translation from the original French, which was published by Brentano’s Publishers in New York in 1915.
