Who is Fantomas? The question opens Fantomas, the first novel in a 32-novel series by the journalists Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. The answer is: “Nothing… Everything!... Nobody… and yet, yes, it is somebody.” And in response to the question: “What does the somebody do?” The answer: “Spreads terror!”

I happened upon a Dover reprint edition of the first novel while browsing at the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York. The name “Fantomas” was familiar to me through my work in film history but it seemed time to find out more. Written over a few frenetic years starting in 1911, Souvestre and Allain’s series features a shadowy criminal, an “enigmatical being who [is] difficult to trace and too clever or intelligent to let himself be caught…” He embodies the fear of a changing world, one that is described by a magistrate in Fantomas as a world in which science can be used for both good and bad: “[T]he hosts of evil have the telegraph and motor-car at their disposal just as authority has, and some day they will make use of the aeroplane.” While not so well known in the United States (although the poet John Ashberry and artist Edward Gorey were fans), the figure of Fantomas was celebrated by the French surrealists as well as Jean Cocteau, Rene Magritte, Julio Cortazar and others; it illustrates both the influence of crime fiction on “high culture” as well as crime fiction’s longstanding yet not always predictable connection to film.

Contemporary writers of crime fiction typically aim to write a book a year; in contrast, Souvestre and Allain were hired to write a 380-page novel every month for 24 months. They overperformed and wrote 32 Fantomas novels over a period of about three years in a process described by historian Robin Walz in Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century France. The two men would outline all the chapters for a week, take turns writing chapters for the next two weeks, and spend the final weeks editing and working out transitions.

The end result was a mammoth chronicling of the exploits of a master criminal whose shocking acts of violence are largely unmotivated and who, according to Walz, “loves to commit three kinds of crimes: violent murder, spectacular robberies, and large-scale disasters.” Even from a contemporary perspective, Fantomas’s crimes seem particularly vicious—such as escaping execution by arranging for an unsuspecting actor to take his place on the guillotine or “scalping a woman alive by catching her long hair in the ringers of an automatic washing-machine.” Fantomas is feverishly chased by Inspector Juve and the journalist Fandor in every volume, but he always escapes to embark on a fresh set of terrors.

As the print series was nearing its completion in 1913, the French film director Louis Feuillade began his five-part series of Fantomas films for the production house Gaumont. These films are classics and as film historian David Bordwell describes them on his blog, “like our Bond and Bourne franchises”—only more than half a century before Ian Fleming’s James Bond or Rober Ludlum’s Jason Bourne ever saw the light of day. Crime stories seem to have a particular affinity for film—violence and thrilling chases are not just staples of both, they’re intrinsic to the character of both to make the heart race and to shock and horrify. But it’s more than that—it seems that for early film audiences and readers of sensational crime fiction the acts of reading and watching were part of combined package. They went hand in hand and needed each other in a way that, as contemporary audiences, we might find hard to understand.

The Fantomas films set the stage for Feuillade’s other great crime series, Les Vampires (1915), which features the black-bodysuit-wearing-actress Musidora playing a female villain. Les Vampires was released by the Gaumont company in time to compete with another series of wildly popular films: Les Mystères de New York, a French remake of the “Elaine” action films of Pearl White, themselves based on American detective novels by Arthur B. Reeves. But even though Les Vampires was more gruesome and shocking than Les Mystères, the latter proved more popular. In “Changing Views and Perspectives” film historian Rudmer Canjels speculates that might be the case in part because Les Vampires didn’t have a literary tie-in. (It wasn’t based on a book and wasn’t released in tandem with a print version of the story.)

In the United States, the “Elaine films” of Pearl White were released concurrently with installments of the novel printed in the newspapers, and Les Mystères, the French adaptation, was released with detailed French version of the story printed in the papers, which could later be purchased as a book. Although Fantomas went directly from book to film, a series like Les Mysteres went from (American) book to (American) film to (French) film adaptation to (French) book that more than tweaked the original. This was a formula that worked very well—the print versions expanded on the film action and provided a deep dive into characters’ motivations and other details. Feuillade would follow this pattern in his future serials. So while we’re used to book-to-film adaptations, in the early years the adaptations also went the other way: from film to book, and from book to film to (adapted) film to (altered) book. Fantomas, who among his other skills, was a shape-shifting master of disguise, would have appreciated it.

Mystery correspondent Radha Vatsal is the author of A Front Page Affair and  Murder Between the Lines.