Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler

Edgar Hull is a gambling at a Munich club when he suddenly and mysteriously starts losing, seemingly on purpose. He walks away from the table in a confused dazed and deep in debt—he can’t understand why he played that way.

Little does Edgar know that his opponent in the game was the mysterious hypnotist, master of disguise, and archvillain who calls himself Dr. Mabuse, and that Edgar was merely his latest victim. When Inspector von Wenk, a state attorney, arrives to question Hull, the plot quickly turns to murder—and worse—as Mabuse continues his reign of mesmeric terror on Munich’s gambling class. But Dr. Mabuse isn’t just in it for the money—his aim is something far greater.

Dr. Mabuse, along with Fu Manchu and Fantômas, is one of the earliest examples of the “supervillain” archetype popular in modern media like the Bond series or comic books. He’s a seemingly invincible chameleon with an eerie, inexplicable power over people; he seems to be controlling a shadowy organization with a greater, more sinister, goal; and he’s always one step ahead of the law.

Jacques wrote Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler with the aim of criticizing the extravagance of German post-war society. This makes the novel a kind of time capsule of the era, playing on the gamut of contemporary interests and fears including hypnotism, psychoanalysis, decadence, and the question of whether a society that permitted World War I is a society that could be redeemed.

The novel was successful in its day, but was made even more famous by the Fritz Lang silent movie of the same name, which was so popular with both audiences and critics that it almost completely overshadowed the novel.

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