The article presents a review of K. A. Chekalov’s monograph on mass French literature of the end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th centuries. The author studies the genre, thematic and stylistic changes in popular works on the example of the oeuvre of Gaston Leroux and other famous novelists of the ‘Belle Epoque’ (Leblanc, Souvestre, Allain etc.).