In some stories he isn’t identified as Lupin at all. Because the scoundrel’s name is a household word, when attempting to rescue someone or perform some other noble deed he must not disclose his identity. It would be counterproductive for those in need to worry that their benefactor is actually scheming to profit from their misfortune. In one story you will learn that Arsène Lupin is not even his real name, but to say more now would be cheating. Often Lupin calls himself Horace Velmont. Some of his aliases are anagrams—Paul Sernine, for example. All of the stories in the third collection, 1921’s The Eight Strokes of the Clock, star one Prince Serge Renine, although Leblanc makes clear in a preface that Renine is Lupin. “But there comes a time when you cease to know yourself amid all these changes,” murmurs Lupin with a straight face, “and that is very sad.”
In the 1929 fifth collection, Arsène Lupin Intervenes, he appears as Jim Barnett, a private detective who admits that he is funded by none other than the notorious Lupin. But as his behavior indicates, and as Leblanc makes clear in another prefatory note, Barnett is merely a new persona for Lupin. Readers had clamored for the thief to turn his talents to detective work and Leblanc was trying to oblige. These later adventures are excellent detective stories, but the present edition concentrates on Lupin’s unlawful phase, as exhibited in the earlier collections, especially the first and second.
A consummate publicist, Lupin assures that his painstakingly cultivated reputation precedes him. When necessary he can score a psychological triumph merely by identifying himself at the perfect moment. A greed-driven thief might assume that anonymity would best serve his professional needs, but Lupin sees himself as an artist. He needs an audience. His saving grace as a character is that, like Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe, he is self-aware enough to admit his vanity and ambition. “You know what a fool Lupin can be,” admits Lupin to his friend; “the idea of appearing suddenly as a good genie and dazzling others would make him commit any number of offenses.”
A major stockholder in the Parisian newspaper Echo de France, for which his creator wrote, Lupin doesn’t hesitate to use his influence to run articles written about (or even by) himself. This particular Leblanc joke inverted an already established routine. From the genre’s inception, detectives employed the popular press to help them achieve their aims. It is a standard ploy for Sherlock Holmes to place an advertisement in a newspaper to entice a suspect—a trait, like so many others, that Conan Doyle pilfered from Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” C. Auguste Dupin employs a Le Monde advertisement to lure the sailor who has misplaced a homicidal orangutan. Usually, when Lupin’s latest caper receives its inevitable behind-the-scenes newspaper treatment, the public sympathizes with him. Leblanc’s devious method places the reader in the point-of-view of the other characters. It adds to our entertainment that they are not privy to one key fact in our own possession—that if Lupin isn’t visible onstage for awhile, he must be directing the action from the wings.
A theatrical metaphor seems apt. Lupin quickly made the metamorphosis from the page to the boards—and thence, of course, to the screen. Leblanc co-wrote the first dramatization, Arsène Lupin, with the popular playwright Francis de Croisset. In the summer of 1909 the many theatergoers who enjoyed it included Marcel Proust, who was diverting himself with baccarat in Cabourg and saw a production of the play in the theater of the Grand-Hotel. How odd to imagine the profound and verbose Proust sitting in the audience of a play written by the blithe and concise Leblanc, but one trait they have in common is an omnipresent irony. Moreover, an aspect of crime fiction— besides its plethora of unreliable narrators—that would later make it a pet form of the nouvelle roman is its emphasis on structure, always one of Proust’s chief concerns.
THE BELLE EPOQUE OF CRIME
Lupin’s own humor is omnipresent. The stories are outrageous, melodramatic, and literate, and they sparkle with amusing banter. When he explains that he is posing as an ex-cabinet minister, Lupin adds, “I had to select a rather overstocked profession, so as not to attract attention.” Often he speaks of himself in the third-person: “Lupin juggles deductions like a detective in a flashy novel.” On one occasion he thinks, “I sometimes ask myself why everybody doesn’t choose the comfortable profession of a burglar. Given a little skill and reflective power, there’s nothing more charming.”
The thief taunts his intended victims as well as the police. In one story he writes letters from prison inviting a wealthy banker to ship his art collection to him rather than cause Lupin the trouble of stealing it—and he adds that the larger Watteau in the dining room is a forgery. His frequent laugh is the triumphant guffaw of Robin Hood once more outwitting the Sheriff of Nottingham. An outrageous sense of play underlies every caper. Lupin strategizes with the zest of a novelist, foreseeing alternatives and accommodating them in advance. He flouts rules because rules constrict. “By Jove, I wouldn’t sell this moment for a fortune!” he exclaims when anyone else might simply abandon the (illicit) task at hand. “Who dares pretend that life is monotonous?”
Such irreverent glee shows up in other great outlaws, although not quite to Lupin’s manic extent. Edwardian criminals had little patience with Victorian standards of good behavior, and during the first decades of the new century brash rogues were rampant. Guy Boothby created the aristocratic thief Simon Carne in 1897. The same year, Grant Allen published his superb interconnected stories about confidence man Colonel Clay and united them in An African Millionaire. In 1899 E. W. Hor-nung published the first half-dozen Raffles stories in Cassell’s magazine. Although he is the best known of all this crew, largely because Hornung was such a fine writer, Raffles was actually a small-time thief, repeatedly demonstrating that he deserved the adjective in the first collection’s title, The Amateur Cracksman.
In 1902., writing under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown, R. Austin Freeman—creator of the first great scientific detective, Dr. Thorndyke—and John James Pitcairn launched a series about a gentleman thief named Romney Pringle. Soon after the debut of Father Brown in 1911, G. K. Chesterton supplied the death-attracting curate with a recurring adversary, master thief Flambeau, about whose artistic talent for crime both author and detective wax poetic. The only American of this period who compares with British and continental thieves, Frederick Irving Anderson’s Godahl (nicknamed “the Infallible,” probably by himself), enjoys nothing in life more than outwitting someone who is trying to outwit him. Jeff Peters, the con man in O. Henry’s 1908 collection The Gentle Grafter—although penny-ante compared even with Raffles—particularly enjoys gulling a bumpkin who is out to take advantage of the stranger in town.
“He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans,” says O. Henry of Peters; “he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars.” Scoundrels real and fictional found such a guise useful, in an era when Pittsburgh moguls were building castles out of the lives of coal miners, when the latest millionaire in London might have been cracking the whip a month before over diamond sifters in Kimberly. Readers gradually discover that Grant Allen’s sly “colonel” is waging a war against Gilded Age hubris as much as replenishing his own coffers, and Allen’s stroke of genius was to have his thief repeatedly target the same victim. Piratical capitalists were becoming a popular mark. Jeff Peters maintains that his partner is so dishonest he couldn’t trace his family tree any farther back than a corporation. By the 1920s another deft disguise artist, Edgar Wallace’s Four Square Jane, was robbing “people with bloated bank balances” and donating “very large sums to all kinds of charities.” Lupin laments the greediness of the middle class and sometimes claims to be performing a public service.
“Take him for all in all,” said Leblanc of his character, “there is more good in him than in some rich lords and barons.” In one of these stories—it would be unfair to name it, because the discovery arrives toward the end—we glimpse the f
ormative youth of our hero. Naturally he began his career with a spectacular burglary at a precocious age, and naturally we sympathize with his motive.
On the slippery slope of morality, just downhill from disrespect for bourgeois values lies disdain for authority. Wallace’s clever Jane doesn’t hesitate to taunt the police with telegrams a la Lupin: “Please take all precautions. Don’t let me escape this time.” Clearly men were not the only ones having unlawful fun. Frederick Irving Anderson’s protagonists include the jewel thief Sophie Lang, who was incarnated in three 1930s movies before the Hays Office declared that no criminals would profit from their crimes on wholesome American screens. Roy Vick-ers, now remembered mostly for his Department of Dead Ends stories, wrote of his thief character Fidelity Dove, “There was a spirit of sportsmanship, of fun, even in Fidelity’s most hazardous exploits.”
Perhaps the best statement of felonious bravado was made in the 1930s, by Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar, alias the Saint—the only fictional character worthy of inheriting the mantle of Lupin. Charteris’s remark could have been about his French ancestor: “The Law, in the Saint’s opinion, was a stodgy and elephantine institution which was chiefly justified in its existence by the pleasantly musical explosive noises it made when he broke it.”
It is worth noting, however, that such outlaw notions were not exclusive to criminals. Their opponents could be equally autonomous. In the first Sherlock Holmes story, Holmes asks Watson, “You don’t mind breaking the law?”
And his sidekick casually replies, “Not in the least.”
ALMOST LITERATURE
By the second decade of the century, the already famous Leblanc was spending most of his year in Passy, an exclusive Right Bank neighborhood in the affluent Sixteenth Arrondisement. He wrote in a shed in his garden. It held a work table and chairs, an inkwell and pens, and had only three walls, leaving the fourth side open to the elements. Even in cold weather, gloved, muffled to the ears, Leblanc could be found in the shed writing. But no one was supposed to go looking for him there; he was not to be disturbed.
Summers Leblanc spent near Honfleur on the Normandy coast, across the narrow mouth of the Seine estuary from the larger and more bustling Le Havre. A medieval port, Honfleur had become over the last half-century a favorite haunt of Courbet, Renoir, and other painters. Just upriver was Tancar-ville, where Leblanc stayed at the chateau with his wife and son. The area boasted Norman towers and a Roman amphitheater, and not far away were the Bayeux tapestry and Rouen Cathedral—and the site, three decades later, of the D-Day invasions. Leblanc loved this history-drenched region of apple orchards and half-timbered houses. “I have some Italian blood in my veins,” he sighed, “but here at Tancarville I am Norman— only Norman.” He set many Lupin adventures in Normandy.
At the chateau Leblanc kept his muse obedient by following the routine he had established in Paris. He went so far as to have a shed built like the one he used in his city garden, and of course he surrounded it with the same strict privacy. In Normandy, however, his view extended across the fields and marsh to the slowly meandering river. When not working he still avoided most of the chateau life. His bedroom was in an isolated building, the Tour de l’Aigle, the “Eagle’s Tower,” which had been constructed a century before out of stones from the castle. About five every afternoon he went into his bedroom and closed the curtains and—in total darkness, he claimed—thought through his next day’s work.
But the popular author was no recluse. In August 1912 the English critic and dramatist Charles Henry Meltzer journeyed across the channel to meet with Leblanc at his summer home, and the following spring he described this encounter in the British magazine Cosmopolitan. Meltzer is careful to establish from his opening sentence that an interest in fictional roguery is not unworthy of a cultured gentleman. “Crime,” he intones, “has at all times charmed the loftiest minds.” As evidence he invokes Macbeth and Crime and Punishment and even Shelley’s Cenci, although each involves homicide rather than larceny. He could have cited even Daniel’s astute cross-examination of the elders who slander Susannah. We have always written about crime; the Code of Hammurabi is older than the Odyssey.
By the time that Meltzer visited him, Leblanc had already published two collections—Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar in 1907 and Arsène Lupin Contre Herlock Sholmes in 1908. The second was an entire volume of feeble parodies in which Lupin bests a straw man who little resembles Conan Doyle’s detective. For some reason, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos twisted the name further, into Holmlock Shears, but the present edition presumes to restore Sherlock Holmes’s real name, which Leblanc was going to use until Conan Doyle’s attorneys squawked loudly enough to be heard across the channel.
Leblanc had also already published his two best novels, The Hollow Needle in 1909 and 8x3 in 1910, although he would go on to write several more. The Lupin of these longer outings rises to an even more outrageous, almost mythic, level. The Hollow Needle, a roller-coaster of deception on several levels, reads like a hybrid of the last Captain Nemo adventure and the first James Bond, and 813 blends the Knights Templar and international intrigue a century ahead of The Da Vinci Code. A new novel, The Crystal Stopper, was in press, and 1912 would also see publication of the third collection, The Confessions of Arsène Lupin.
“His novels and short tales are more than clever,” says Meltzer of Leblanc, and bestows the maladroit tribute, “They have the merit of being almost literature.” It was Meltzer who penned the quotable blurb about Arsène Lupin: “… a scoundrel who, to the skill of Sherlock Holmes and the resourcefulness of Raffles, adds the refinement of a casuist, the epigrammatical nim-bleness of a La Rouchefoucauld, and the gallantry of a Du Guesclin.” The latter (less well known off his native soil) was a fourteenth-century adventurer with a wildly varied and risky life.
The Chateau de Tancarville dates back to the tenth century. Founded by a favorite of William the Conqueror—whose mother’s grave is nearby—it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries. Now its crumbled ramparts arched over grass and were clothed with ivy. Meltzer arrived in heavy rain. Ahead, at the end of a shaded avenue, Leblanc was waiting for him against the ruins. Expecting a crime-savvy cynic, Meltzer found instead a sedate and gracious host with “kindly eyes.” A frequent smile peeked out from under a valance of unruly mustache darker than his sparse gray hair.
When asked how he knew so much about criminology, Leblanc laughed and exclaimed, “But I am blankly ignorant! I never met or talked with thieves and rogues. They do not interest me. I never had the faintest wish to know them. My stories are pure romance—the fictions of my brain—the merest fancies.”
Meltzer asked if he had ever studied criminology at all, and Leblanc replied that he had read Edgar Allan Poe and studied Balzac. “All the romance of crime was suggested in Poe’s works. I don’t remember anything besides Poe and Balzac that could have helped me work out my plots—unless my fondness for the game of chess was useful. Chess helps one to make plays. And why not novels?”
Leblanc neglected to mention France’s pioneer detective story writer Emile Gaboriau, who in 1868 had based his insightful Monsieur Lecoq on the real life of thief-turned-policeman Francois Eugene Vidocq, who rose from guttersnipe to founder of the Surete. But Gaboriau’s painstaking detective work and restoration of order were not for Leblanc—and much of Gaboriau’s style was also inspired by Poe and Balzac. In his famous survey of the crime genre, Murder for Pleasure, the mystery critic Howard Haycraft described a crucial distinction: “Leblanc is perhaps not quite the equal of Gaboriau… in the realm of pure ratiocination, but he is an infinitely more resourceful and convincing storyteller, a finer master of plot and situation….” Some critics suggest that another inspiration was Rocambole, the cavalier rogue in Ponson de Terrail’s series of novels The Dramas of Paris.
After a genial discussion of the character and the series, “I have to charge you with a grave offense,” said Meltzer. “Do you not think you h
ave done some harm by making a hero of a man like Arsène Lupin?”
“No, I think my conscience is at least as nice as most.” Leblanc did Meltzer the courtesy of not smiling. “And if I thought that I had harmed my fellows— But I do not.” Leblanc admitted that at one time he worried about this issue himself, that for awhile he didn’t want his son Claude to read his books. “Since then, however,” said the creator of the thief who picked the pocket of Sherlock Holmes, “I have changed my mind.”
Suggestions for Further Reading
SELECTED BOOKS BY MAURICE LEBLANC
Publication dates given are for first French editions, although titles have been translated into English. English and American editions usually appeared the next year.
A Woman (1887)
Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar (1907), published in English variously as The Exploits of Arsène Lupin, The Seven of Hearts, and other titles
Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes (1908)
The Hollow Needle (1908)
813 (1910)
The Frontier (1912)
The Confessions of Arsène Lupin (1912)
The Crystal Stopper (1913)
The Teeth of the Tiger (1915)
The Woman of Mystery (1916)
The Eight Strokes of the Clock (1922)
The Secret Tomb (1923)
The Tremendous Event (1924)
Arsène Lupin Intervenes (1928)
Wanton Venus (1934)
OTHER WORKS
Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-thief (Penguin Classics) Page 2
