On 12 April 1919, the Paris police arrested a bald, short, 50-year-old swindler at his apartment near the Gare du Nord, acting on a lead from a humble housemaid. A century later, Henri Désiré Landru remains the most notorious and enigmatic serial killer in French criminal history, a riddle at the heart of an unsolved murder puzzle. The official version of Landrus lethal rampage was so shocking that it almost defied belief. According to the authorities, Landru had made “romantic contact” with 283 women during the First World War, luring ten of them to his country houses outside Paris where he killed them for their money. Yet no bodies were ever found, while Landru obdurately protested his innocence. “It is for you to prove the deeds of which I am accused,” he sneered at the investigating magistrate. The true story of laffaire Landru, buried in the Paris police archives for the past century, was altogether more disturbing. In Landrus Secret, Richard Tomlinson draws on more than 5,000 pages of original case documents, including witness statements, police reports and private correspondence, to reveal for the first time that: Landru killed more women than the 10 victims on the charge sheet. The police failed to trace at least 72 of the women he contacted. The authorities ignored the key victim who explained why the killings began. Landru did not kill for money, but to revel in his power over what he called the “feeble sex”. Lavishly illustrated with previous unpublished photographs, Landrus Secret is a story for our times: a female revengers tragedy starring the mothers and sisters of the missing fiancées, a lethal misogynist and Frances greatest defense lawyer, intent on saving his repulsive client from the guillotine.

THE BLOODY DOLL: “La Poupee Sanglante”, the classic novel of vampirism and serial murder by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom Of The Opera, is finally published in a new and completely unexpurgated translation. One night, the voyeur Benedict Masson spies on Christine, the watchmaker’s beautiful daughter; after witnessing the watchmaker murder Gabriel, her handsome lover, he is propelled into a fantastic carnival of encounters with a series of grotesque characters, including a voracious, ancient vampire known as the brucolac, and his servants, the sinister members of an oriental death cult. Masson must now attempt to find the answers to several vexing questions. Who was the mysterious Gabriel – in what way might he be connected to the watchmaker’s experiments in mechanics and his claim to have achieved perpetual motion? What has this got to do with the sinister Marquis de Coulteray, the watchmaker’s landlord? Why have a series of young women disappeared in the vicinity of Benedict’s villa in the countryside? But nothing is ever as it seems in the world of Gaston Leroux. THE BLOODY DOLL was written in the aftermath of the trial and execution of Henri Désiré Landru, also known as “the French Bluebeard”, one of the most notorious serial killers in French criminal history. A mixture of detective fiction, horror and romance that will be familiar immediately to readers of Leroux’s more famous works, the book will also appeal to fans of Poe, Conan Doyle and Stoker, refracted through a lens of early 20th Century proto-steampunk pulp fiction. It can be read as either a satire on the famous case of Landru, or simply enjoyed as an incredibly entertaining, blood-splattered adventure from the archives of a master storyteller.

This study offers a theory for feminist intertextuality based on strategies at work in rewritings of the Bluebeard fairy tale. The book asserts that feminist intertextuality revises one coercive intertext in particular: that of intertextuality theory itself. Rewritings of the fairy tale accordingly can be seen to privilege either the embedded narrative or the escape from it, subscribing either to monologic or dialogic intertextuality. The work examines the original Bluebeard tale group (Perrault, Grimm, variants); historical and modern Bluebeards; and other writers, including Jane Austen, William Godwin, Margaret Atwood, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, Gloria Naylor, Emma Cave, Max Frisch, Stephen King, Meira Cook and Donald Barthelme.