ZIGOMAR

Zigomar is a character dreamed up by Leon Sazie in 1909 two years before the now much more celebrated Fantomas An evil nefarious character a criminal genius Zigomar was so popular in his time that his picture could be found on bags of bread pipes and matchboxes  Masked hooded or in disguise Zigomar constantly bedevils the law The first of the masked supercriminals he shares with Fantomas a taste for gratuitous melodramatic crimes imaginative atrocities typhusbearing mosquitoes being only one such example murder kidnapping robbery and torture His inevitable escape from the clutches of the law his perpetual evasion of justice made him very popular with the public and he left his mark on the history of crime fiction Of Basque origin Leon Sazie was born in Algeria in 1862 and died in an accident in Suresne near Paris in 1939 When he was still a child his father committed suicide after being ruined in a bank fraud Sazie eventually became a journalist before turning to theater and eventually to serial fiction He created Martin Numa King of detectives in 1908 and Zigomar a year later He was also a brilliant fencer who fought several duels  This volume translated and introduced by Michael Shreve contains a translation of the first of the six Zigomar novels plus an introduction bibliography and filmography Zigomar was adapted three times for the screen in silent movie serials