This wasn't very good. It's a very mediocre crime thriller/detective novel. The only reason I read it is because it took the Parisian avant garde by storm. Blais Cendars has a quote on the front claiming this novel is 'the modern Aeneid'. This is a flaw that intellectuals have. They like to celebrate high culture and low trash culture, whilst they feel obliged to hate middle brow culture, and this can lead to all kinds of ridiculousness. This is an example of the kind of condescending attitude that leads the mainstream to hate intellectuals. Anyone that reads this can see that it is a bad novel, but one contrary leader of intellectual fashion decides to proclaim it a masterpiece and then everyone else follows. They would never celebrate something like the Sherlock Holmes stories or Dashiel Hammett because they are too obviously and straightforwardly good. There has to be something about the pop culture enthusiasms of intellectuals to leave ordinary people scratching their heads, like claiming The Monkees are better than The Beatles. It reminds me of that Simpson's episode where Homer gets angry and smashes his car up, is spotted by an art critic and gets claimed as an outsider artist of genius. The object of the admiration of the avant garde should not understand why they are being celebrated or that they are being condescended too. It's the same reason they all fell in love with Rouseau's untutored primitive surrealist paintings. This also reminds me of the enthusiasm the French surrealists felt for 'The Monk' by Matthew Lewis, which they claimed was the only acceptable novel. Artaud wrote a surrealist French translation of the novel, which was then translated back into English. I read it and discovered that it is exactly the same as Lewis' version, but shorter. I was expecting all kinds of additional surrealist interventions in the text, and was sorely disappointed. With Fantomas I was expecting some kind of primitive brilliance, in which the eponymous villain is a an enigmatic, motiveless anarchist murderer. In fact he murders for money and the only thing different about him is his disguises. Heath Ledgers portrayal of the Joker is closer to what I was expecting than what I got here.