Additional information
by Norbert Jacques (Author), Jeffrey L. Carrier (Translator)
He sits down at your table a stranger. By morning he owns your fortune, your will, and even your voice.
Germany, in the ruined years after the Great War. Into the gambling clubs and séance parlors of a society coming apart walks a man with no fixed face: physician, hypnotist, forger, market-rigger, and murderer. He calls himself many names. The one that matters is Mabuse, and his single ambition is to rule everything and everyone within his reach, for the pleasure of the power alone.
First published in 1921, Norbert Jacques' Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler was the sensation of its age, selling more than half a million copies and giving the twentieth century one of its great villains. Within months Fritz Lang turned it into the monumental silent film that made Mabuse a legend and helped define German Expressionist cinema. Yet the novel behind that masterpiece has been almost impossible to read in English for a hundred years, available only in a loose, heavily censored 1923 version that even discarded the book's real title.
This new translation changes that. Rendered fresh from the original German, it restores what a century of readers has been missing:
- The complete, unabridged novel, every scene, in full
- The book's true title and structure: the Gambler, in all twenty-one chapters
- The plainness and heat of Jacques' original, the violence, the sexuality, and the fever the earlier English edition smoothed away
- An original introduction on Jacques, Weimar paranoia, and the Mabuse legend, plus a note on the translation
Pursued across a disintegrating Germany by State Prosecutor Wenk, Mabuse is the mastermind as a mirror of his age: the unseen hand behind the chaos, the man who plays a whole society the way a cardsharp plays a deck. Here, at last, is the source, whole and in English.
