I have posted on pulp characters from overseas, and one of those is the French pulp character Joseph Rouletabille. He is a dashing, young journalist who solved mysteries and was created by Gaston Leroux, better known as the author of The Phantom of the Opera. Rouletabille operates by use of pure deductive reasoning, what he calls the “good end of reason.”
Black Coat Press has reprinted a few of the original novels from the early 1900s, and for the past few years Martin Gately has been writing new stories about the character in Tales of the Shadowmen from volume eight to 16, though not in every one.
In a new BCP collection, The New Exploits of Joseph Rouletabille, all of those stories are pulled together. We get the following stories:
• “The Terror of the Shangaï-Express,” from Tales #13, places Rouletabille on the “horror express” from the movie of the same name, and was originally titled “Rouletabille Rides the Horror Express”.
• “Rouletabille in London,” from Tales #14, was originally titled “Rouletabille at the Old Bailey.” It brings Rouletabille to London, where he will team up with a very young Harry Dickson, and together prove the guilt of a German spy. There is a very nice scene at the end with several other London detectives.
• “The House of Despair,” from Tales #15, and “The Yellow Terror,” from Tales #16, is a two-part story that has Rouletabille again teaming up with Dickson to deal with some German spies in England in the years before World War I. In the first part, they had run afoul of them, and concludes the adventure in the second part.
• “Leviathan Creek,” from Tales #8, has Rouletabille going up against Kapitan Mors, a long-running character in German pulps, a Nemo/Robur-type character called an “Air Pirate.”
• “Rouletabille vs. The Cat,” from Tales #10, put him into the plot of the play “The Cat and the Canary” (which has been made into several movies, including a Bob Hope comedy).
• “The New World Order,” from Tales #11, has him dealing with a “Technological Hierarchy” trying to setup a secret base from which it will emerge as the new ruling order after wiping out most of humanity with a plague. Rouletabille is assisted in this with Capt. Anthony Rogers (that’s Buck Rogers to you) and Hugo Danner, in a story set post-WWI.
• “Rouletabille on Mysterious Island,” from Tales #12, finds Rouletabille on Jules Verne‘s “mysterious island,” and the true origin of Captain Nemo is revealed. Also mixed in are elements from the 1951 movie serial Mysterious Island.
I enjoyed all these stories when I read them in Tales, and if you’re just interested in Rouletabille, this is a great collection to get alongside the original novels. I do hope we continue to get new Rouletabille stories from Gately and we can get a second collection at some point.
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