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

Oscar-Bill. Oscar-Bill was created by "Érik," the pseudonym of the French author André René Jolly (Dr. Fulminate, Martin Gale, Professor Magnus), and appeared in Les Exploits Extraordinaires d’Oscar-Bill le Roi des Détectives #1-8 (1931) and Oscar-Bill le Roi des Détectives Dans Ses Exploits Extraordinaires #9-26 (1931).

The French Oscar-Bill is a small, bespectacled man, with a thick mustache and a small hat. He is not particularly tough-looking but is world-renowned and is as "omniscient as Nick Carter." He is tenacious and always smiles, even when threatened with death. Oscar-Bill is assisted by his dog, Flok, and by his best friend, the journalist Toukrak. Oscar-Bill takes on thieves, kidnapers, villainous American cowboys, sinister Chinese Yellow Perils and Tong hatchet men, but he often finds that his archenemy, Bill Archinoy, is behind the crimes he is investigating. The high point of the series is Oscar-Bill’s clash with Professor Mephisto, which takes Oscar-Bill into Mephisto's electric underground city.

* I'm including the Oscar-Bill stories in the Best of the Encyclopedia list because of his archetypal status. Oscar-Bill, it can be argued, is the archetypal post-1919 French pulp adventurer, with an archetypally French attitude, archetypally French Rogues Gallery, and an archetypally French imaginative content in his stories, one influenced on some level by the ideasplosive heftromane that were being translated into French and published in the 1920s and 1930s. 

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