Wednesday, October 31, 2018

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: The Hands of Orlac - Maurice Renard

Horror enthusiasts, whether of the written word or the cinematic variety, may recognize the title I'm about to discuss.  Unless you've read the novel, however, you have no idea what Maurice Renard was getting at when he wrote The Hands of Orlac (1920).  Those who may have seen one of its many filmed adaptations have never seen the real vision of the novel which is more than the nightmare of two hand grafts gone terribly wrong.  Though populated with ghosts and occultists, several seances and necromancy and all sorts of supernatural trappings, The Hands of Orlac, in fact, is not a horror novel at all. Rather it is a brilliantly fashioned detective novel wherein a series of impossible crimes are made to appear to be the work of supernatural agencies and a spectral being.

Stephen Orlac is a concert pianist who is travelling back to Paris for a long awaited reunion with his devoted wife, Rosine.  En route to the City of Lights the train crashes and there are multiple casualties. Rosine rushes to the scene of the accident and finds her husband under the body of a man clad entirely in white.  The man in white later appears at various spots throughout the wreckage leading Rosine to dub him Spectropheles.  This ghastly figure will continue to haunt her throughout the novel appearing and disappearing at the most unexpected places.

Unlike the man in white, Stephen has survived but has also sustained terrible injuries and must be rushed to a hospital for immediate surgery. He is operated on by Professor Cerral, a celebrity surgeon specializing in neurology and transplants.  Stephen receives two hand transplants and his torturous recovery and attempt to regain his musical skills are the basis of the plot. Those who know the many movie versions know the secret of those hands and I'll not reveal it here. A fairly overused horror movie trope by now this gimmick of the hands seems to be an original idea of Renard's and he may be the first writer to use it in sensationalized genre fiction. The truth of Stephen's new hands is not revealed until the second half of the novel long after a variety of outrageous events occur ranging from ghostly manifestations, "externalized nightmares", an impossible jewel theft and the equally impossible return of the jewels to a safe in a locked rom, necromancy via a painted portrait as well as a seance complete with table tapping.

Original French edition 1920
The first half of the novel is told through Rosine's viewpoint. Though the novel is named for Stephen Orlac he is almost a minor character in this entire section. Everything we see is through Rosine's eyes and we read only of her perceptions. She is distraught that her husband is haunted by a grueling and painful recovery yet she is also terrorized by Spectropheles who she feels is responsible for a series of break-ins and crimes in their home. When the violence leads to murder the police are called in and the novel takes a sharp turn into the land of French detective novels.

It is here that the influences of French pulp writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, creators of master criminal Fantomas, can clearly be seen. The first half of the novel subtitled "The Portents" has faint whiffs of the popular Fantomas serials so popular only five years prior to the publication of Renard's book.  With its constant reiteration and recap of previous action and incidents the story bears obvious structural similarities to a serial and most likely did appear as one in a French newspaper or magazine. Central plot motifs like the ghost of a murderer being responsible for two deaths and the bizarre idea of a rubber glove bearing fingerprints of another person are two ideas that appear prominently in the third Fantomas serial published in book format in English as The Messengers of Evil (1911).  Renard must have been familiar with that serial. He even includes a mythical gang supposedly behind all the criminal activity. His dangerous group, La Bande Infra-Rouge (The Infra Red Gang), is pure French pulp fiction. Apaches and murderous gypsies roamed the pages of French crime stories as much as Italian thugs and Irish gangs would appear in US pulp magazines. When Inspector Cointre, the egotistical policeman who seems entirely fashioned after Eugene Valmont, begins to fasten onto the idea of faked fingerprints all hope of the supernatural has pretty much been thrown out the window.  Cointre has some of the best dialogue in the novel, too. After ripping apart a sofa and finding puppets and props that were used by the fake medium he expounds: "When dealing with mediums, never get you furniture re-covered, or at least keep an eye on your upholsterer."  

At this point it is almost certain that the crimes, especially the murders, will appear to be the work of human hands and not spectral ones. Renard does what the French do so well in the earliest forms of detective fiction. He adds twist after twist. Stephen meets with the murderer who confesses his crimes. Then Renard dares to reveal that this being is in fact a walking dead man!  But Renard is not finished with his twists until the final paragraphs when Cointre reveals the final solution to all the mysteries with an unexpected announcement.

Second English translation, the better one!
(Souvenir Press/Nightowl Books, 1980)
The Hands of Orlac is one of the finest examples of French sensationalist fiction that one can find.  The English translation by Iain White (Nightowl Books/Souvenir Press, 1980) is the second and better version for (unlike the expurgated previous English translation of 1929) it retains the full lurid details, the relentless melodrama heightened with lightning strikes of exclamation marks on nearly every page, and the nearly hysterical voice of Rosine Renard describing in grisly and horrible detail the living nightmare she is experiencing in her home. Dream imagery floods the novel. Omens are inevitable, practically inescapable. Rosine's dreams are prophetic; much of what she sees while asleep later comes true. The words "portent" and "phantasm" occur with such frequency that one often expects for the ghosts to waft off the pages.

The most surprising element in the novel not seen in any adaptation I've watched is that Stephen's father, Edouard Orlac has become obsessed with spiritism. He and his friend Monsieur de Crochans have been dabbling in communicating with the dead.  Though they are suspected of collaborating with fraudulent mediums and police are investigating their activities. In the climax of the first section one of the necromancy sequences seems to be genuine with a shocking surprise for Stephen when he spells out the name of the spirit they have contacted. And yet for all Renard's fascination with the macabre, the abundance of weird and paranormal activity, he is compelled to rationalize everything that occurred in the first half when he relates the second half entitled "The Crimes."

In the last chapters Rosine and Stephen face the inevitable and horrible truth, something the reader has most likely guessed at even if he has never seen nor heard of the several movie Orlacs. But a French detective novel has never been French without the ultimate surprise saved for nearly the final paragraph. When that gasper comes in The Hand of Orlac it is both satisfying for the reader and a godsend for Stephen and Rosine.

14 comments:

  1. Well, this sounds fabulous, John -- I may not be the biggest fan of sensationalist fiction, but I've recently read and enjoyed a slightly (let us say) overwrought example of French impossible crime fiction and am starting to wise up to the aspects of that culture applied to that style of writing.

    I see the English edition ain't cheap, but I'll absolutely keep an eye out for this one. Thanks-you for bringing it to my attention; I'd heard of the film, and may well have overlooked this on that account since it doesn't really sound like my kind of thing!

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    1. I've seen MAD LOVE with Peter Lorre and that's practically a rewritten version that has hardly anything to do with the original novel. The silent version probably is the truest to the source novel. Starring the great Conrad Veidt as Stephen Orlac this movie erases nearly all of the supernatural content from the story and focusses on Orlac's tortured mind. A portion of the original crime plot is retained including the extortion scheme (which I don't discuss in the review above) and solution to the one murder that occurs, but not nearly as much crime and violence as occurs in the novel. This surprised me because the silent version is two hours long and easily could have included the entire story as Renard wrote it. But as with most silent movies the movie prefers to tell the story visually through close-ups of histrionic facial expressions and heightened physicality and posturing. I've downloaded the last version made in 1960 with Mel Ferrer as Orlac and that looks to be absent of supernatural content as well based on random selections of scenes. There's a stage magician in it! Not in the book at all. I'll probably be watching the whole movie soon just out of curiosity to see how much of the real story is kept intact.

      None of the movies make the story true to Renard's original intent -- a supernaturally tinged crime novel. All of the movies were more concerned with the psychological suspense aspects and the idea (real or imagined) of the original owner of the hands "taking over" Orlac's thoughts and actions.

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    2. Well, if someone is going to have to silently portray the existential dread of not controlling their own hands, who better than the marvellously expressive Lorre? I remember first encoutering him in Fritz Lang's M when I was in my early teens, and it's a performance that still stays with me to this day!

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  2. Oh brrr... A concert pianist with a bilateral hand transplant. What could possibly go wrong?

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  3. I have obtained a copy of the original French version Les Mains d'Orlac (1920)and will be reading it soon. It seems to be a combination of crime, detection and fantasy.

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  4. I have obtained the kindle edition which is available free at Amazon.

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  5. For an even earlier treatment of the concept of having a murderer's hands grafted on, check out MORTMAIN by Arthur Cheney Train (1907).

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    1. Thanks! The title says it all. I’m sure the idea was a fascination for writers. Transplant medicine was in its infancy and imaginations ran wild with the possible nightmarish after effects. I’ve written about the obsession with “monkey glands” in 1920s thrillers in the past.

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    2. "Those who know the many movie versions know the secret of those hands and I'll not reveal it here."
      But I think it has been revealed now !

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    3. If you’ve read the book, you’d know that it still has not been revealed. (!)

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    4. I have just read the first 7 chapters !

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  6. I have just finished part 1. The final sentence of part 1 is a real shocker !

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  7. I'm a little bit behind on my blog reading. So sorry for the late response, but this one has been added to my ever-expanding wishlist. Somehow, Paul Gallico's Too Many Ghosts came to mind when reading your review, but far more lurid than Gallico.

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    1. Not at all like Gallico's novel, TomCat. If you have read early 20th century French crime fiction, especially anything by Allain & Souvestre in their Fantomas series, then you'll have an idea of what awaits you. This is very French! The closest I can draw analogy to (outside of Fantomas) is the work of another Maurice -- Maurice Level, one of the masters of the conte cruel type of short story. He also wrote two of the most successful plays for Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris during the early 20th century.

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