The Best of Lupin: Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (Vintage Classics)

The Best of Lupin: Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (Vintage Classics)

A selection of classic stories featuring France's answer to Sherlock Holmes: a brilliant master criminal with a mischievous sense of humor—now the inspiration for the major streaming series Lupin . Arsène Lupin is a gentleman and a thief, a world-famous master of disguise and a planner of elaborate heists. His exploits are regularly splashed across newspaper pages, entertaining all of France as Inspector Ganimard of the Paris Police fruitlessly pursues him. Lupin often turns detective himself when it suits him, solving puzzles that have stumped the experts, and occasionally he even matches wits with his rival from England, “Herlock Sholmes.” A bane to the powerful and generous to the powerless, Lupin is exceedingly witty, marvelously clever, and always a gentleman. The twenty-two delightful stories in The Best of Lupin , drawn from five collections published nearly a century ago by Maurice Leblanc, have stood the test of time and are ripe for rediscovery. MAURICE LEBLANC (1864–1941) was born in Rouen, France. Author of numerous novels, he is best remembered now for his short stories and novels featuring the brilliant gentleman-thief, Arsène Lupin. There were five collections of Lupin stories: Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar (1906), Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes (1908), The Confessions of Arsène Lupin (1912), The Eight Strokes of the Clock (1922), and Arsène Lupin Intervenes (1928). ABOUT THE INTRODUCER:  Martin Walker is the author of a series of mystery novels set in France featuring Bruno, Chief of Police, including To Kill a Troubadour and A Chateau Under Siege . Best sellers in Europe, his novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. He divides his time between Washington, D.C., and the Dordogne in France. From the INTRODUCTION By Martin Walker  Arsène Lupin stands alongside George Simenon’s Maigret as one of the immortal figures of French crime fiction. He emerges in 1905 as the antihero in a serial novel by Maurice Leblanc, a young journalist from Normandy, in the French magazine Je Sais Tout [I Know Everything]. Lupin became an immediate global success. The first US film of his exploits, The Gentleman Burglar, was made in 1908. Two years later, Berlin’s film studio in Germany made Arsène Lupin contra Sherlock Holmes. The first Japanese film, Rupimono, followed in 1923. The Barrymore brothers starred in an early Hollywood talkie in which Lupin goes for the Mona Lisa, all followed more recently by wave upon international wave of TV series, manga, comics, and video games in Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, and most European languages. Often compared with Sherlock Holmes, Lupin is in fact significantly different. While almost all the superstars of crime are on the right side of the law, Lupin is most of the time a criminal, a gentleman[1]thief. And although he has moments of public-spiritedness and personal generosity, he is no Robin Hood who can be relied on to take from the rich to give to the poor. As he declares in the splendid short story “Edith Swan-Neck”: “I may have peculiar views about other people’s property; but I assure you that it’s very different when my own’s at stake. By Jove, it doesn’t do to lay hands on what belongs to me! Then I’m out for blood!” Lupin is hard to pin down. Sometimes he is the Russian prince Serge Rénine, with an apartment on the fashionable Boulevard Haussmann, while in the later stories he is just as likely to play the hard-bitten American private eye, Jim Barnett, with a modest office on the Rue Laborde. Opening a trial (from which Lupin inevitably escapes), the judge says Lupin is widely believed to be the professor who introduced the Japanese art of jiu-jitsu to Paris, and that he won ten thousand francs in the Grand Prix bicycle race and was never heard of again, and before that he was the Russian student who researched bacteriology and skin diseases at the laboratory of Doctor Altier in the Saint-Louis hospital. And sometimes Lupin is the sworn but admiring rival of that famous English detective Sherlock Holmes, opening a new front in that centuries-long love-hate relationship between the French and their neighbors across the Channel. In their first encounter Lupin steals, but then returns, Holmes’s pocket watch. “He is possessed of a marvelous intuition . . . surpassing even that of Sherlock Holmes himself,” Sherlock Holmes admits to himself in “The Jewish Lamp,” one of the series of stories of their confrontation published in 1908. “I resemble an actor whose every step and movement are directed by a stage manager . . . a superior will.” The visit of Holmes to Paris had been orchestrated by Lupin, and as Holmes steps off the train, he sees all over Paris men carrying sandwich boards advertising THE MATCH BETWEEN SHERLOCK HOLMES AND ARSÈNE LUPIN—READ THE DETAILS IN the ECHO DE FRANCE (the newspaper in which Lupin is a major shareholder). Threats of legal action by Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes’s creator