THE HANGMAN'S ROPE: ROCAMBOLE SAGA · BOOK NINE

The last adventure of Rocambole - the book its author did not live to finish.The tunnel is coming down. Rock falls from the vault, the ground roars, and somewhere beneath the Thames Rocambole stands calm in the dark with a pickaxe in his hand and his people behind him. Ahead: a slab of stone sealing the passage like a door. Behind: the police, and the gallows.What follows is the strangest and most feverish story in the whole saga. A hangman's rope, sold as a good-luck charm, becomes the key to a madhouse. A servant crosses the world and survives shipwreck, starvation and a cannibal island to prove that a dead lord is alive. A Scottish inheritance hangs on a convict's false name, a photograph arrives in the morning post, and a man calling himself Mr. Bury dines quietly at a London hotel while the fortune he came for is counted out for him.Through it all moves the Grey Man - older now, graver, playing his last and longest game across the fog of Victorian London, Bedlam, Newgate and the Highlands.An honest word about this volume. Ponson du Terrail was still writing The Hangman's Rope on 18 July 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke over France. He fled Orléans to fight the invaders, was hunted, saw his house burned, and died at Bordeaux in January 1871, aged forty-two. The saga stops mid-action, at full speed, and was never resumed. The original French editor's note explaining what happened is preserved at the end of this book. Readers should know they are holding a magnificent unfinished thing.The Hangman's Rope is the twenty-seventh and final volume of the series that gave French the word rocambolesque - "wildly, gloriously improbable" - and gave the world the criminal-turned-avenger who inspired Arsène Lupin.Now in fresh, modern English - never before published in English. Sofia E.V. Hamett's translation is faithful to every plot turn and character, rendered in the natural prose of a modern thriller. Nothing has been abridged.