7 h 27 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the darkest secret of your identity belongs to a life before this one?
The Man with the Black Feather by Gaston Leroux brings together reincarnation, hidden identity, and the crimes of a past life. Mystery meets Gothic unease in a story that asks what the past can mean for the present—and how much a hidden history can threaten a person's sense of self.
Leroux's fiction returns to people who are not what they seem, buried guilt, and secrets that refuse to stay hidden. Here, the promise of a past life gives those concerns a strange edge. Come ready for melodrama, strong emotions, and the unsettling possibility that identity holds more than one story.
What you’ll discover
- A past that threatens Explore the disturbing idea that crimes from another life can cast a shadow over this one.
- Identity beneath the surface Follow a mystery built around hidden identity and the fear of not knowing yourself.
- Crime with Gothic unease Step into the space where criminal secrets meet the strange possibilities of reincarnation.
- Drama without restraint Let strong emotions and melodrama draw you into Leroux's world of danger and secrets.
- Guilt beyond one lifetime Consider what responsibility might mean when a story reaches beyond a single life.
Who will love it
For readers who love Paris, comic mystery, haunted pasts and odd science, and for anyone who enjoys a mild hero tangled in a wild plot full of spiritualists, police and old criminals.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A box, a memoir, and a prison visit
- A scrap of paper in his own hand
- Reincarnation, a song, and the Black Feather
- A pocketful of stolen goods and a portrait
- Cartouche, the king of thieves, in his own words
- The violet cat, the purring, and Signor Petito
- The Mage, the operation, and a pain that crosses centuries
- Cartouche is not dead, and the calf takes its revenge
- What the book is really about, and how it is told
Who’s who
- Theophrastus LonguetA timid, honest retired maker of rubber stamps who believes only in common sense until a scrap of paper in his own handwriting changes his life.
- Marceline LonguetHis pretty, loyal wife, who loves her gentle husband and is horrified by what appears whenever his other self takes over.
- Adolphe LecamusTheophrastus's best friend, a travelled Spiritualist who explains reincarnation and keeps promising to help his friend.
- M. MifroidA vain, logical Commissary of Police who plays the violin and soon finds his own pocket picked by his new acquaintance.
- Signor PetitoThe handwriting expert who lives upstairs and schemes with his wife to find the treasure that the old paper promises.
- M. Eliphas de la NoxA glowing occult Mage who believes he can cure Theophrastus by killing off the soul of Cartouche with psychic surgery.
- CartoucheThe eighteenth-century king of Paris thieves, whose old self rises inside Theophrastus and whose ways of working the city he brings back.
Formats and delivery
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- Large-print eBook
- The same book in bigger, clearer type, from the first page.
- Audiobook
- 7 h 27 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 7 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Der Mann mit der schwarzen Feder
by Gaston Leroux · 1904
A mild rubber-stamp maker visits a prison and starts picking pockets, singing slang and hearing a bandit's voice.
Medium level5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
A rubber-stamp maker walks into a prison and comes out speaking in the voice of a robber dead for two hundred years. The Man with the Black Feather is a comic crime novel by Gaston Leroux, the writer behind The Phantom of the Opera.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A box, a memoir, and a prison visit
The story begins with a frame. The author, a journalist at Le Matin, receives a sandalwood box from a gloomy man named Adolphe, who says its owner, Theophrastus Longuet, has died. Inside is a bundle of manuscripts, and the author decides, after checking the facts, that the tale they tell is true.
Then the memoir itself starts. Theophrastus, a timid man who has just retired from making rubber stamps, decides to improve his mind by visiting old monuments. He brings his pretty wife Marceline and his best friend Adolphe Lecamus, who has travelled and studies Spiritualism. At the Conciergerie, the old palace prison in Paris, the party is bored by a torture chamber that has become a dispensary.
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What is The Man with the Black Feather about?
It follows Theophrastus Longuet, a mild Parisian rubber-stamp maker who begins to act like the eighteenth-century robber Cartouche after a visit to the Conciergerie prison. His wife, his friend and the police try to cope.
What does the Black Feather mean in the book?
Adolphe uses the idea of a black feather, from Darwin's pigeons, to describe a soul's old traits reappearing in a new body. For Theophrastus it means the moments when Cartouche takes over.
Who was the real Cartouche?
Cartouche was a famous French bandit chief of the early eighteenth century, called Louis-Dominique. The book uses details from his legend, including his gang, his arrest in 1721, and his name as the king of Paris thieves.
The author
Gaston Leroux
1868–1927 · French mystery novelist
Gaston Leroux was a French author and journalist born in Paris in 1868. He wrote mystery novels, including The Mystery of the Yellow Room, published in 1907, and The Phantom of the Opera, serialized in 1909–1910. He later lived in Nice, where he died in 1927.
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