Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [44]
A recent critic, Robin Walz, summed up the improbability of the series: “One of the fundamental characteristics of the Fantômas series is the ability to swerve the story through space and time. Narrative coherence depends upon the title character’s ability to be anyone and anywhere, at any time, in order to sustain the action. It is a further condition that the reader set aside the question of what happens to one or another of his identities when Fantômas is yet someone else.… To enjoy the story, the reader has to accept these fundamental incoherences of time, space, and character.” 44
And readers did. The books were an immediate hit, their popularity cutting across all classes. Bourgeois shopkeepers, countesses, bohemians, and poets devoured the Fantômas stories as soon as they were published. The masked man in evening clothes who towered over Paris appeared on kiosks and billboards and the walls of the Métro. The image was everywhere, like Fantômas himself, showing that no one was safe. The two authors ultimately produced thirty-two novels before Souvestre’s death in 1914; Allain then did eleven more on his own, marrying his ex-partner’s widow as well.
The reader always knows that the criminal will be Fantômas. The puzzle is in seeing through his disguises and finding him among the other characters. He could be in the guise of a nun hiding a weapon under her habit or posing as a physician arriving at a patient’s bedside not to heal but to poison. Sometimes he is the lover of a beautiful woman; at other times, a doddering old man or a professor.
Fantômas’s many guises reflected a particular concern of the French police: to establish with certainty the identity of those people who were arrested. Bertillon had in the 1880s worked out a scientific method of enabling law enforcement officials to penetrate disguises. With Fantômas, there seemed to be no real person underneath: he had taken the power of disguise that Vidocq possessed, and extended it to his essential nature. Part of the appeal of the series, especially to Apollinaire and other avant-garde thinkers who embraced it, was that it asked readers to search beneath the surface to find the nature of things — a common theme of modernism in both art and science. Just as Fantômas disregards the conventions of morality, so too does he defy ordinary logic. He has entered that elusive fourth dimension that mathematicians, scientists, and artists were then trying to discover.
It was, of course, easier for fictional characters to break old patterns and shatter rules, but Paris’s real-life crime fighters were taking note of what their make-believe counterparts (and make-believe villains) were doing. They too were pushing forward, creating new tools and methods. For better or for worse, they would soon have plenty of opportunities to experiment with these innovative techniques.
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SCIENCE VS. CRIME
Vidocq, the first head of the Sûreté, had begun the practice of taking a scientific approach to the detection of crime, even though his primary tools were his phenomenal memory and his psychological insight into the criminal mentality. As the nineteenth century advanced, however, the police increasingly used new scientific discoveries in their work. Chemistry and physics, as well as statistics, physiology, biology, psychology, and the new social sciences of anthropology and sociology all made contributions to crime fighting. Developments in technology, such as the microscope and the camera, gave detectives even greater power. Over time, a science of criminology was born and the modern detective came into being.
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Émile Zola’s description of a naturalistic novelist’s work could be used equally well as a pattern for the criminologist: “The novelist starts out in search of a truth… he starts from known facts; then he makes his experiment, and exposes [the character] to a series of trials,