THE MYSTERY OF THE XV (4)
By:
February 6, 2026
Léo Saint-Clair, known as the “Nyctalope,” is an indomitable crimefighter with night vision — and an early example of a pulp superhero. Excerpted here is a section from the first of his many outings, in Jean de La Hire’s Le Mystère des XV (The Mystery of the XV, serialized in 1911 in the French newspaper Le Matin). There’s a proto-Batman vibe to the Nyctalope; here, he even mentors an irrepressible teenage sidekick. In Josh Glenn’s translation, which first appeared in the anthology Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (MIT Press, Summer 2025), he’s attempted to retain the proto-cartoonish tone of the prose.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
Arriving moments later at the jungle’s edge, he kneeled under cover of a tree trunk and employed his piercing eyes — eyes for which night had never existed, except when he closed his eyelids—to survey the scene…
The immense clearing stretched out, as flat and empty as a scrupulously maintained factory floor. In the center of this space, a three-hundred-meter pylon raised its slender frame towards the sky, like a sort of gigantic lightning-rod or the fantastical skeleton of a prodigious factory smokestack. Metal cables became invisible as they stretched upward into the sky, and innumerable metal guy-wires sprang from the circumference of the clearing — stretching diagonally into the pylon’s framework.
It’s the world’s largest radiotelegraph installation, mused Saint-Clair. But where are its control stations? Where do the base’s workers live and toil?
Selecting two flexible boughs from a bush, he bent them and tied them together at their tips. That way, upon his return to the jungle, he’d easily find the spot from which he’d emerged.
After standing up slowly and listening carefully, he took twenty steps forward. He stopped, listened again, peered around him… Nothing! The ground underfoot appeared to be paved with concrete. He resumed his slow progress… perhaps five minutes passed. He stopped — still nothing.
The clearing isn’t guarded, he thought. If it was, they could have killed me twenty times over since I came out from cover.
More rapidly now, he moved forward again until he was at the foot of the immense pylon. Still no sign of any defenses.
He made a close inspection of the installation. Embedded in the concrete, the pylon’s massive pillars surrounded an empty space of perhaps a hundred square meters. Passing under one of its metal arches and advancing into the space beneath the pylon, he scrutinized the ground… but there was nothing underfoot but the featureless concrete. Peering upward, he grew dizzy trying to trace the slender metal uprights, connected by X-shaped bars, as they disappeared into infinity. Around the pylon’s uprights were coiled eight enormous cables, coated with insulating fabric.
FRENCH PROTO-SF TRANSLATIONS BY JOSH GLENN: Raymond Roussel’s LOCUS SOLUS [excerpt] | Noëlle Roger’s THE NEW ADAM [excerpt] | Alfred Jarry’s THE SUPERMALE [excerpt] | Jean de La Hire’s THE MYSTERY OF THE XV [excerpt].
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.