As a writer of fiction, Leroux drew no distinction between the literary opus and the mass-produced pulp novel: “I always took the same care over an adventure novel, in serial form, that others take over the composition of a poem. It was my ambition to raise the standard of this kind of writing.” His complex stories combined elements from all major popular genres: adventure, action, exotic imperialist travelogues, detective stories, science fiction, horror, and romance. These were currents in popular fiction that had often originally been imported to France (particularly true in the case of detective fiction from America and England, as exemplified by Poe and Doyle: Leroux’s two major influences), but he made each of them his own.
Leroux took the roman policier to a hitherto unknown level of complexity with The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Woman in Black – two of the few of his books available in English translation at the moment – and wrote that “from the point of view of the mystery novel, I wanted to make something better than Conan Doyle and more complete than Poe.” He developed the problem of ‘the locked room’ crime-scene, a device that would be taken up innumerable times elsewhere. He introduced psychological insight to detective fiction, and even used psycho-analysis as a literary device (the analytical search for the absent father that turns into a real investigation). He was also the main inventor of the French spy novel (e.g. Rouletabille chez Krupp – recently translated by Brian Stableford). His ‘supernatural,’ horror novels – like the Phantom of the Opera or the Bloody Doll – were closer to nightmarish, surrealist dreamscapes than phantasies relying for effect on belief in supernatural causes because, and this applies to Leroux’s fiction as much as to his earlier journalism, there is always a rational, if not scientific, explanation for everything that happens (even if and especially when the explanatory science is pure pataphysics – ‘science in the service of vampirism,’ or the perilous modelling of the sentient automaton).
La Poupée Sanglante was one of Leroux’s last books. Largely written in the first person, it concentrates on the memoirs of Benedict Masson, his voyeuristic obsession with Christine Norbert, the watchmaker’s daughter, and a meditation on the nature of life, death, the depths of love and the superficial abyss of beauty. Its sequel, La Machine à Assassiner, is more of a straightforward detective novel, in which the action is set against an atmosphere of public hysteria surrounding the case of a murderer who has acquired the nickname of ‘the Bloody Doll’ in the popular press, and where we follow Inspector Lebouc of the sûreté générale, as he attempts to track him, or whatever-it-is, down. La Poupée Sanglante was published in 40 daily feuilletons in the newspaper Le Matin between the 1st July and the 9th August 1923. The work was collected in a single volume and published by Les Éditions Tallandier in the following year. La Machine à Assassiner was published in the same newspaper between the 10th August and the 19th September 1923 and, again, collected and published in a single volume by Tallandier.
Leroux was one of France’s best-known feuilletonistes. A feuilleton is a column in a newspaper, separate from quotidian political and economic content, where the writer is given free-reign to speculate on contemporary issues. It is highly subjective and, by nature, humorous and ironic in its judgements. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this was the space in the newspapers where serialized novels were published. Once again, Leroux followed his two major literary influences: Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle both made careers from submissions to dailies and periodicals.
The publication of La Poupée Sanglante in 40 feuilletons, suggests that this was Leroux’s oblique response to the grotesqueries of the Landru case, the most widely reported story of the time. The feuilleton has always been a forum where writers can express rather more individual responses to contemporary issues than those that the demands of editorial policy would normally permit, and La Poupée Sanglante includes some scraps of obscure knowledge that lead me to believe that Leroux had studied the case closely. I can find no evidence that he wrote about the Landru case directly. It is highly unlikely that he would have done so, anyway, having retired from journalism in 1907, but one does not need to sift very far beneath the superficial details of the book to find a series of cryptic references to the Landru case that suggest that Leroux knew the vagaries of the affair in minute detail. The Bloody Doll was Gaston Leroux’s highly ironic imaginary solution to the case of Henri Désiré Landru.
The Doll is not Real – Leroux’s inutilious scholarship, one of the pleasures of his oeuvre in general, is apparent everywhere. From the description of the haunts of the romantic movement at the start of the book, to the moment when Benedict and Christine discuss the ink-spot on the manuscript of Daphnis and Chloë, to the folkloric distinction between a vampire and a brucolac, the torrent of factual details with which Leroux scatters the intricate storyline is astounding in its depth. All of his facts serve a narrative purpose, even if they appear to have been stated at random, and he makes no proposition that cannot be defended. The evidence connecting Leroux’s fiction to the Landru case is almost as circumstantial as the exhibition at the jury’s disposal in its attempt to find some kind of proof, in Landru’s notebooks, that would account for the ownership of objects discovered in Gambais’ ashes. But it is every bit as convincing.
Firstly, there is the choice of Benedict’s name and occupation: the name Benedict means ‘blessed,’ as opposed to Landru’s ‘desired’; and we have already noted that Landru’s father worked in a bookshop called Masson’s on the Île de Saint-Louis, the island in the Seine that is the scene of most of the early chapters of the novel. Leroux is also playing with the early details of Landru’s biography when Benedict, reporting his espionage in his memoirs, describes how Old Norbert “was rarely seen leaving his workshop, except on Sunday to go to mass at the church of Saint-Louis-en-l’lsle, in the company of his daughter and his nephew,” and later, “it was well known that I never went to mass; and when they saw me one Sunday, entering the cloisters of the church of Saint Louis, on the heels of the Norbert family, it was concluded that, evidently, I was a lost boy.” This is the same church in which the young Landru served as a chorister.
Some of the other names and occupations can be accounted for using a similarly intuitive method. Circumstantial evidence:
In the archives of French crime Landru was, in fact, not alone in his proclivity for incinerating his victims: in 1885, writes Bardens (p.108), a watchmaker named Pel was sentenced to death for poisoning his wife and a servant. Their bodies were never found, and the police concluded that they had most likely been cremated in a stove. Could this be the origin of Old Norbert’s occupation (watchmaker)?
The police dossier on Anne-Marie Pascal, a widow who made ends meet by working as a prostitute, using a small haberdasher’s business as a cover, and who was Landru’s 10th victim (1918) begins: “Mme Anne-Marie PASCAL, née le 5 Novembre 1880, ayant divorcée en 1913, à Toulon, avec M. Gabriel, son mari, dont elle avait en un enfant mort en bas âge,” (Bardens, p.62) (‘Mme Anne-Marie Pascal, born on the 5th November 1880, having divorced in 1913, in Toulon, from her husband, M. Gabriel, gave birth to a son who died in infancy,’) – which gives us Madame Langlois’ occupation and Gabriel’s name.
Benedict targets young women via the medium of the ‘situations vacant’ column, rather than the ‘matrimonial,’ but he still uses newspaper advertisements to attract female companions, who later disappear in the vicinity of his secluded villa in the countryside outside Paris. Benedict has a gift for words, like Henri Désiré Landru, but in Leroux’s hands he’s (out)cast as an introverted voyeur-poet rather than a gregarious confidence-trickster who has learned his lines by rote from the study of seduction manuals. Tongue-tied to the point of distraction, and conscious of his unpleasant appearance, Benedict allows his “wretched, heartbreaking, blasphemous, tender, revolting” verse, sold in immaculately-bound miniature opuscules to no-one in particular, to speak when his quotations from Baudelaire and Verlaine fail him.
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p; Christine is attracted to him by the passion of his verse, which she has collected avidly, but is repulsed by his loathsome physical appearance. She begins to read sinister references to Benedict’s crimes in his obscure verses, that she feels she has suddenly understood, after witnessing the cremation of Annie… (“Do not entice me into your fire,”)… leading Christine to lament the fact that “they won’t find the six other victims because he turned them into smoke! When I think that he dedicated verses to me... and wept all over my hands!” Benedict’s Memoirs and poems are, like Landru’s incriminating notebook, his confession… at first sight, at least.
The Marquis of Coulteray’s affliction (vampirism) is Leroux’s imaginary solution to the absence of blood at the murder-scenes. He uses calcium chloride to make blood clot and sodium citrate to make it flow: “it is an anti-coagulant that prevents the formation of a blood clot that would cause the wound to close... If you rub a wound, or a bite or sting, with sodium citrate the vein will continue to empty itself of blood like water bursting from a valve... But, that’s not all...! A mouth that wanted to suck the blood from this wound which has been rubbed with sodium citrate would not need to worry about coagulation, which is something it would otherwise have to monitor,” says Benedict, explaining why there is neither blood at the scene of the Marquis’ attacks, nor much evidence of exit wounds.
Leroux’s second solution to the absence of blood is cremation in the stove. There are two of these appliances. The first is in the atelier where Norbert and Cotentin conduct their experiments on Gabriel. It is used to dispose of the remains of flesh and artificial organs left after their nocturnal surgeries. This is the source of the smoke that carpets the Île de Saint-Louis in “a vortex of smoke and clinker, dark, dense, funereal, which drifts in the direction it will eventually follow, then spreads across the island, letting its cinders fall on the deserted quays, enveloping us in a sinister veil and a disquieting, mournful atmosphere…in which a horrifying odour lingers.” Believing that he has witnessed Gabriel’s murder, during the course of one of his voyeuristic vigils, Benedict is puzzled by the absence of blood from the floor of the atelier Norbert: “Immediately, my eyes turned around the joists of the balcony, to the atelier floor, to the table, to the immense cabinet, as if I were destined to discover the bloody traces of the crime,” but “the floor did not even seem to have been swept... Nothing, nothing, nothing in this long room, which was flooded with daylight, nothing remained here that could hold the gaze of the one who had seen the most – my gaze – which had seen Gabriel murdered!” He’s wrong, of course: Gabriel cannot be murdered because, categorically speaking, Gabriel is not alive.
The second stove, in Benedict’s villa in Corbillères-les-Eaux, is more obviously connected to the Landru case: who could forget the grotesque climax of the novel, when Christine discovers Benedict feeding the remains of Annie into his stove? Leroux describes a conflagration, spewing smoke from the villa’s chimney, “from which there escaped a dreadful odour of burning fat, the last remains of Annie, which were being consumed, piece-by-piece, in a flame agitated by petrol,” which repeats the details of the complaints made to the authorities, by villagers in Gambais, about their suspicions as to the source of the nauseating stench that was emitted intermittently from Landru’s dark little house.
Benedict’s villa in Corbillères-les-Eaux (a fictional location) “at the edge of the black pond,” in a location known only to poachers and fishermen, is carefully modelled on Landru’s lairs in the countryside surrounding Paris. Once again the descriptions of Benedict’s rustic crematorium are augmented by those of the atelier Norbert with its unearthly lights and the stench of burning flesh that pollutes the Béthune Quays at night. Leroux also dwells on Benedict’s purchase of rail tickets to Corbillères – a return to Paris for himself, a single for his female companion (and supposed victim).
Benedict’s defence repeats most of the pertinent points of Landru’s own statements in defiance of the judge. Faced with overwhelming evidence in support of the idea of his guilt (the charred remains of Annie, the baggage and possessions of the other missing women) Benedict says: “Well, yes... but none of this prevents me from being innocent!” He elaborates the point further, in terms of which Landru would approve: “I confess to nothing at all! I have always been too much of a friend of the truth to please you by confessing to a crime I did not commit! Just because I cut a woman into pieces and burned her in the stove does not mean that I am the one who killed her!” When the indignant judge demands “Very well, then, prove to us that you did not kill her,” Benedict more or less quotes the real serial killer’s defence: “That, Your Honour, is none of my business! I am not a magistrate! I am not paid by the government to carry out investigations that are meant to establish the innocence or guilt of any of our citizens! I would not encroach on your prerogatives for anything in the world... do your job properly!” In ‘the Doll is not Real,’ chapter of La Machine à Assassiner, the front pages of the newspapers advance the theory that ‘the Bloody Doll’ is not real – he is a phantasy of the police – and, strictly speaking, impossible. Here, Leroux hints at the cacophony of rumours that accompanied the Landru case, the influence of which led some cynical elements of the public to believe that Clemenceau had ordered blanket coverage of the case, in order to divert public attention away from calls for his resignation. One of Leroux’s peripheral characters, with no more than a walk-on part, says: “I have noticed during my long life that, when the country is agitated, the government finds nothing better to calm it than to give it a dose of terror.”
The Louis XV stylings, that lend such a beautifully anachronistic sartorial atmosphere to the story, also demonstrate Leroux’s thorough knowledge of obscure details of the Landru case. When the police searched the villa in Gambais, Jean Belin found a period costume from the reign of Louis XV among Landru’s loot. For added effect, Bardens tells us that the reign of Louis XV was the time “...when the Marquis de Sade lived his evil life,” (Bardens.p.107) but, chronologically speaking: is this true? Most of Sade’s literary output was written after 1789, in the years immediately following the French Revolution – i.e. in the final years of the reign of Louis XVI. He was really no more evil than any writer of violent pornography, confined to an uncomfortable cell in the Charenton asylum, could aspire to be. The figure of the Marquis de Coulteray, the blood-sucking aristocrat who preys on young women, might hint that Leroux was making the same identification with Sade, or maybe with the sadistic anti-hero Fantômas (immensely popular at the time), although it is impossible to confirm the truth or otherwise of this. Perhaps it will suffice to say that the Marquis represents an anachronistic survival of the 18th Century libertine tradition in general, combined with a reversal of the waiflike figure of the aristocratic vampire, that stalks the Gothic imagination, and the figure of the super-villain, common in 1920s French pulp fiction, who always remains one step ahead of the law and outside society’s normal and normative bounds.
Even events at the end of the book, when an unnamed member of the faculty (actually Jacques Cotentin) removes Benedict’s head from the scene of his execution, are close to the truth of the affair. Landru’s severed head was indeed removed from the scene shortly after his execution to further research in the name of some variant of forensic science, while his body was consigned to an unmarked grave. It can now be viewed, in its pickled final resting place in a glass jar, in the Museum of Death in Los Angeles. Having seen a photograph of this stomach-churning exhibit, I can say with some confidence that the passage of time has not been particularly kind to what little remains of Landru.
The Geometry of Suspicion – from another angle, the events of the novel preclude such an over-realist interpretation. In the hands of le maître Leroux, a satirical comment on an actual criminal case is transformed into a meditation on the nature of love, life, death and beauty. Leroux reverses Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Future Eve and unleashes Shelley’s monster in a more aesthetically pleasing shell –
sculpted in accordance with Romantic ideals of classical beauty – than that of an electrically galvanized assemblage stitched together from bits of corpses. This time a beautiful woman falls in love with an automaton, the replica of a man, which, when brought into consciousness by an experiment involving what we might call steampunk bio-mechanics, involving a radio-active serum and some kind of partly-organic flesh analogue, abducts her and sets out to hunt down his enemies.
What animates the following discussion is a tribute to Leroux’s light-hearted experiments with psycho-analysis as a literary device, rather than any serious intellectual commitment to Lacanian fundamentals. Psycho-analysis, in vogue in the early 20th Century, seems the perfect imaginary science at our disposal to explain this imaginary solution to the case of Henri Désiré Landru.
At the beginning of the Bloody Doll, Leroux warns us not to trust Benedict’s memoirs, since ‘many might contend that the ‘Memoirs’ he recorded, day-by-day, had been drawn up with the sole purpose of making the reader believe in the innocence of a monster who lived in perpetual fear that his crimes would be discovered...” The intricately meshed storyline, that is built-up from scraps of evidence, like a criminal case, emerges at the intersections between the testimonies of several untrustworthy observers (Benedict, Madame Langlois, the Marchioness, Old Violette) with Leroux’s authorial observations only interceding towards the end of the novel when the case, apparently condemning Benedict, begins to unfold. I say apparently because, if re-read carefully, one will see that the evidence actually points elsewhere: to a void of evidence that suggests Benedict’s innocence of the murders, at any rate. As Jacques Cotentin points out: if he could take the blame, he would, in order to have done with his miserable existence. His miserable existence is blameworthy for another, more obvious reason, that should not warrant the slightest attention from the juridical authorities. His crime is symbolic. As Benedict reminds us, presciently: “I am ugly… I am a monster… I am a terrible deformity.”
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