Call It Transmutation: The Radioactive Poetics of Gaston Leroux's And Maurice Leblanc’s Detective Fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the role and representation of radioactivity in two popular novels of the first decades of the twentieth century: Gaston Leroux’s Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907) and Maurice Leblanc’s L’Île aux trente cercueils (1919). It examines how the idea of transmutation emerged as a key concept in the discourse surrounding radioactivity in the years immediately following its discovery, and how Leroux and Leblanc seized on this in their work, using radioactivity’s metaphorical energy to generate narratives which themselves enact various processes of transformation, and in doing so instantiate the transmutation of the adventure novel into the detective novel.