FANTOMAS: THE CORPSE WHO KILLS

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FANTOMAS: THE CORPSE WHO KILLS

BY ALLAIN & SOUVESTRE

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-908694-17-1

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2011 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

INTRODUCTION

FANTOMAS is the Emperor of Crime, the Lord of Terror, the Genius of Evil, the nihilistic and psychopathic anti-hero of a series of sublime pulps, books brimming with motifs of the “marvellous”: nuns, coffins, severed hands, daggers, masks, bells that bleed, corpses, roses and revolvers, gloves of human skin, deathsheads, lunatics and labyrinths. A master of disguise, Fantômas inhabits shadows; no-one knows his true identity or appearance. His penchant is for criminal atrocities and random acts of “beautiful-compulsive” violence, human carnage on a mass scale, outrageous theft, arson and destruction, virtuoso displays of terrorism and chaos compounded by the brutality of the Paris street-gangs under his command. And, “unseizable”, he evades justice every time...

“Fantômas.”

“What did you say?”

“I said: Fantômas.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Nothing... Everything!”

“But what is it?”

“Nobody... And yet, yes, it is somebody!”

“And what does this somebody do?”

“Spreads terror!”

Thus begins Fantômas (1911), the first book in a series of thirty-two, conceived a decade before Surrealism but admired almost from the start by the Paris avant-garde of the time. As early as 1912, Fantômas was wildly acclaimed by the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire (who would invent the term “Surrealist” in 1917) and his circle of friends, including the Cubist painters Picasso and Juan Gris, proto-Surrealist writer Max Jacob, and the arch-modernist Blaise Cendrars. Reviewing the pulp novels in the literary journal Mercure de France, Apollinaire praised them as being “amongst the most imaginative works in existence”. He and Jacob soon founded an appreciation society, the Societé des Amis de Fantômas, attracting many members. Jacob included two prose-poems, “Fantômas” and “Fantômas Again” in his 1916 collection The Dice Cup ( Le Cornet à Dés), whilst Blaise Cendrars in 1914 proclaimed Fantômas to be “the school hymn of brutish humanity”, a work akin in poetic scope to the Latin classic The Aeneid. And Juan Gris’ still-life canvas “Fantômas: Pipe And Newspaper” of 1915 showed a cafe table scattered with various items, including a copy of a Fantômas novel (an icon of the “marvellous” in amongst everyday objects).