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Glossary and Character Taxonomy  Breakdown by Country of Origin   Bibliography   Table of Contents    The Best of the Encyclopedia

Dunot, Marcel. Marcel Dunot was created by the French author José Moselli (Browning and Co., M. Dupont, Jean Flair, Iko Térouka, Fédor Ivanovitch Sarraskine, John Strobbins, Baron Cesare Stromboli, Jack Temple, Wasili Tchorok, Andreas Vollmer) and appeared in hundreds of stories in L’Épatant, Le Roi des Boxeurs, and L’As from 1912 to 1939, beginning with L’Épatant #237 (Oct. 10, 1912); the series was reprinted in Spain in 1929 and 1932.

Marcel Dunot is the "King of Boxers," an adventurous pugilist whose travels bring him into contact with all sorts of criminal types. Dunot is bloodthirsty and has a pronounced mean streak. When Dunot leaves Holy-Quentin, his home, and goes to New York City, he tangles with the boxer Fred MacFarlan, the boss of the criminal organization the Black Hand. In Honduras Dunot is named the Minister of the Navy in order to stop the civil war raging there. Dunot fights the Black Hand in China and Russia. Dunot fights with Frank Flint, an auto magnate, and Mathias Landers, the rubber king. In Haiti Dunot defeats the plans of Charlemagne Sale-Trou, who plans to take over the island and become its Emperor.

During World War One Dunot expresses his author’s deep and visceral hatred for all things German by brutally killing Germans in Belgium, the Balkans, German East Africa and Central America, and the Panama Canal. After the war ended Dunot continues wandering, fighting Mme. Eventail, a Yellow Peril Dragon Lady bandit queen, and then the implacable Japanese spymaster Nagoaka in Shanghai. Dunot eventually retires to his South American mansion and lives off the proceeds of a gold strike he once found in the Klondike.

* I've included Marcel Dunot in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because in a small way he was historically important. Jose Moselli, Dunot's author, was certainly fecund, imaginative, and a hard worker, and at his best he could be very good for a pulp author. The Dunot stories are typical Moselli: full of adventure, ranging around the world, and involving lots of fights against racial, ethnic, and country-based stereotypes. So rather interchangeable with many other, similar characters. But Moselli wrote hundreds of Dunot stories, possibly over a thousand, over a 27-year-period which coincided with the height of international pulp culture. Dunot was a mainstay of that culture in France by virtue of appearing month after month or even week after week for 27 years on end. That, and the generally good quality of the stories, made Dunot into a kind of icon and archetype for brawling two-fisted pulp adventurers in France. 

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