ABSTRACT
In her aptly titled study, Plotting Terror, Margaret Scanlan demonstrates that terrorism novels occasionally foreground the “affinities between literary and terrorist plots.” Although Scanlan refers to a very specific type of narrative – one in which novelists are explicitly confronted and compared with terrorists at the level of diegesis – her point has more general relevance. Like Henry James and the Stevensons before him, Joseph Conrad drew on the turn-of-the-century public discourse on terrorism to create the plot for his novel; and like them, he did not simply fictionalize facts. Rather, he teased out and exploited the fantastic aspects of terrorism which were already present in the public discourse, where fact and fiction were sometimes difficult to distinguish. A membership card of the Autonomie Club was found in the dead man’s pocket, revealing him to be Martial Bourdin. Bourdin was a twenty-six or twenty-seven-year-old tailor from France, who had joined his brother in London about seven years previously.
