Who wrote these dime novels? The difficulty this question poses stems from the fact that most of these booklets were published under pseudonyms. In some cases, the author’s name is nowhere to be found on the print copy. Thus we only know the authors of the most well-known series, such as “Les aventures étranges de l’agent IXE-13, l’as des espions canadiens,” by Pierre Saurel, the pseudonym of Pierre Daigneaut (1925-2003). Pierre Saurel also authored other series published by Éditions Police-Journal. The pseudonym of Paul Verchères can be attributed to the author of popular novels Alexandre Huot (1897-1953), but the matter is further complicated when the Éditions Police-Journal writers swap pseudonyms or write under more than one pen name.

 

For the collector François Hébert, the identity of the authors of serialized novels remains, for lack of archival material, one of the important blind spots in the research on Québécois dime novels.[1] Many questions merit further study: did the authors move from one publishing house to another? Who was hiding behind the pseudonyms of romance novels, who suffered a particularly bad reputation due to their “sentimental” intrigues? Who were Mimi Estival, Betty Forest, Jeanne Zéphyre, Pol Roger, Michelle Pierre, Louis Champagne, Andrée Pineault, Rita Lebrun?

 

[1] François Hébert, La littérature populaire en fascicules au Québec, Québec, Les Éditions GID, 2012, p. 51.