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Clamart, Frank. Frank Clamart was created by Henry C. Rowland (Corrigan) and appeared in three serials, a novel, and a movie from 1911 to 1923, beginning with “Léontine and Co.” (The Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 12-Sept 9, 1911).

Frank Clamart is an American rogue in France. He’s from a hard school and is “an old offender–a récidiviste—all cataloged and Bertilloned. I’ve done my little trick in Cayenne and this time it’s au bat’ d’Afrique for mine.” With his lover Léontine Petrovski Clamart was robbing a house when he discovered that it was his half-brother John who Frank was robbing. Frank lets his John shoot him so that Léonitine could flee. Clamart is caught and does five years hard time. When he is released he vows to go straight, and his John forgives him, but, unfortunately, Frank find John’s wife Edith desirable–very much so–and falls for her. Léontine gets in touch with Frank, but she is still a part of the underworld, and Frank knows he can’t be with her. Then John sells his jewels to pay for gambling debts and frames Frank for the theft of the jewels, and Frank, seeing no other way to make Edith happy, lets himself be blamed and goes back to a life of crime so that both Edith and Léontine can be happy.

Unfortunately, Frank then gets on the wrong side of Monsieur de Maxeville, the French master thief known as “Chu-Chu le Tondeur—the Shearer,” a vicious killer who has many admirers but few friends. A prolonged duel follows which Frank eventually wins. After that he moves to England and becomes a Killer Vigilante, happily eradicating the gunsels, hirelings, and bosses of an international drug and murder ring. Clamart is hard-boiled, a fatalist, a clear-eyed realist, but also strangely sentimental, especially about John, Edith, and Léontine.

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