Finished Fantômas
I just finished reading Fantômas, a 1911 French crime novel I've wanted to read as research for a project.
I first learned about the book after stumbling across its Wikipedia page, which describes its publication history. Many of the books in this series were written in collaboration between two authors, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, who wrote the books together by writing alternate chapters simultaneously and then concluding the book with a jointly-written final chapter. This allowed them to apparently write tons of these books very quickly. They also developed a strategy for film licensing that allowed many films to be made about the character very quickly.
The book has a kind of crazy episodic quality to it that definitely reveals its shared authorship. Chapters jump around in perspective constantly. Very rarely does one chapter continue the story of the previous one. Sometimes, back to back chapters contain the same characters, but they act completely differently because they are in disguise, and the reader doesn't even know who is who, really. I have wondered if this technique was chosen specifically because it helped to marry the work of the two authors more seamlessly.
The story is deeply preoccupied with disguises. A running theme is the idea that a person who is good enough at being in disguise can utterly disguise themselves, completely concealing their identity even to people who know them quite well. It definitely made me think back to Sherlock Holmes stories with a similar preoccupation. I guess the idea of being in disguise was simply very fun and interesting for the people of the early 20th century. It feels like a very quaint idea now, when everyone carries are high definition camera at all times and countless data companies probably know the exact distance between each of my pupils. But for a time period when cameras were rare and travel was difficult... well, it makes sense that a person misrepresenting themselves would feel much more serious and dangerous!
I had a ton of fun recognizing the roots of other zany pulp crime/detective tropes here, too. There's a scene where people are knocked out with sleeping gas, there's some crazy technology the cops have that I doubt existed in real life, there's a plucky boy reporter, and there's a ton of dramatic courtroom scenes. The cop stuff, in particular, makes the story feel a lot more dated than Holmes ever will. Because he is not a cop, you don't have to read about Sherlock Holmes navigating the innards of the Victorian criminal justice system. But these French cops literally measure a character's skull with calipers in this book!! Wowza!!!!
I can't say that the book was good - obviously, it felt like it was kind of all over the place - but it had some pretty fun twists. Like a lot of older crime fiction, the "solvable murder puzzle" elements are undermined by the fact that they rely on contextual knowledge that's no longer part of our daily modern life... or contextual knowledge that is very culturally Parisian. (There's so much about Parisian train schedules in this book!!) I often found myself completely lost. However, the disguise stuff is fun, and that theme very quickly becomes a major feature of the story, and that's a bit easier to track.
I don't know if I'll read another one of the books about this character - I might go read some Lupin instead - but I'm doing research on this topic for a project and have to read a bunch of zany old crime stuff. At least it's enjoyable! If you want to read Fantomas, this is one of the titles provided by Standard Ebooks, a group which provides very carefully-edited and standardized epubs of public-domain works. I liked the edition I got from them!