The phantom returns, part 2
The phantom returns, part 1
A gallery of phantoms
Continuing with the turn-of-the-century gaslight crime theme, Paul has now moved on to Arsène Lupin stories. Although the term ‘gaslight crime’ indicates the time before Edison’s incandescent bulb replaced gas lighting (approximately from 1807 until Queen Victoria’s death in 1901), it is probably more accurate to say that these particular stories evoke the Belle Époque period which began in 1871 and lasted until World War I. Arsène Lupin is a product of that period. His creator Maurice Leblanc published the first story, ‘The Arrest of Arsène Lupin’, at the Je Sais Tout magazine in 1905 in response to Arthur Conan Doyle’s extremely popular Sherlock Holmes stories. The story was such a success that Leblanc went on to write a number of Arsène Lupin short stories (eventually collected in 24 books) as well as novels. Like Fantômas (see post below), Lupin is a thief and a master of disguise, changing from one deceptive appearance to another in a blink of an eye. However, unlike Fantômas, he is not a murderer. He is rather a ‘gentleman-thief’; a scoundrel for sure but also charming, humorous as well as glamorous – not entirely unredeemable qualities.
Phantom flight
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.
