Sometimes the "good guys" really are the bad guys. And sometimes, the "bad guys" really are the good ones. More than a hundred years ago, a French author named Maurice Leblanc created one of the latter - a thief, by trade, who has proven to be one of the most enduring and endearing characters in mystery fiction: Arsène Lupin. I'm not sure whether he has ever been out of print in France, but English language editions of many of the Lupin books continue to find readers who delight in some of the escapades of this "gentleman-thief." A good introduction, certainly, may be found in Arsène Lupin: Gentleman Thief. Here's the podcast review I recorded almost a decade ago.
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“Adventure exists everywhere, in the meanest hovel, under the mask of the wisest of men. Everywhere, if you are only willing, you will find an excuse for excitement, for doing good, for saving a victim, for ending an injustice.”
Those are the words of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief, a character created a century ago by the French author Maurice Leblanc…and also the title of a new and delightful anthology.
We begin our story today in 1905, more than a hundred years ago. In London, stories about Sherlock Holmes had been appearing for some 18 years. The French publisher of a magazine called Je Sais Tout – I know all – asked Maurice Leblanc if he would write a good adventurous detective story. Leblanc responded with a story called “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” about a noble thief, a man who could be counted on to be chivalrous, charming, funny, witty – and quite willing to steal a wealthy man’s possessions. It was an instant success – so much so that the editor asked for more stories. According to Michael Sims’s introduction to this Penguin edition, Leblanc protested – "I can’t keep it up. Lupin has been arrested." The editor’s reply – "Lupin is worth saving." And so, in the next story, we find Lupin in prison (where he manages to put through an incredibly successful swindle and theft on the outside, despite being safely locked up). And in the story after that, Lupin makes his escape.
Lupin’s charm lies in the fact that, while he is quite obviously a criminal, he is one with an open hand and an open heart. Think Robin Hood rather than Al Capone. Later in his career, Lupin even does some detective work, usually working quite independently of the police and trying to point them in the right direction.
All this happens in the course of a body of stories that are well written, charming, quite deliberately funny, and even somewhat provocative. In one story, for example, Sherlock Holmes himself is summoned to help capture Arsène Lupin – who promptly steals the great detective’s pocket watch.
The reader’s sympathies are always with Lupin – although Lupin himself may be disguised in the story, his identity not made clear until the end. Like many other detective-story characters of the period, Lupin was a master of disguise, an artist who could make the “man of a thousand faces” seem like an amateur. There is one detective in particular who serves as Lupin’s nemesis and pursuer, a Parisian chief inspector named Ganimard, and Lupin takes a great deal of pleasure in tweaking the detective’s nose – even as he helps manipulate his foe into discovering the right solution to a mystery.
In one of the stories in this volume, for example, Ganimard is walking down the street when he observes two people behaving very strangely – one dropping bits of orange peel on the sidewalk while the other, apparently unconnected, follows and marks the building at that spot with a piece of chalk. Suspicious and intrigued, Ganimard follows the pair. They lead him to an old and rather remote house. The detective hears the sound of fighting upstairs. He rushes in – and finds the two men whom he has been following are pounding the floor with chairs to make it sound as they were fighting. A third man walks into the room – Arsène Lupin, who has used the other two to lure Ganimard to this rather remote house. Lupin’s purpose is to present the detective with the solution to a murder without giving Ganimard the opportunity to arrest his old foe – but the reader finds himself delighted by the inventiveness of Lupin (and of course of the author).
Most of these stories are quite funny as well. Lupin is, always, the supreme egotist. At one point, he sends a letter to a very wealthy man, announcing his intention of burglarizing the man’s castle and suggesting that it would be much easier and more convenient if the intended victim would simply send the desired objects directly to Lupin and save him the trouble of having to burglarize the castle. This letter contains the following postscript:
"P.S.: Be sure not to send me the larger of the two Watteaus. Although you paid thirty thousand francs for it at the salesrooms, it is only a copy, the original having been burned under the Directory, by Barras, in one of his orgies. See Garat’s unpublished Memoirs. I do not care either to have the Louis XV. Chatelaine, which appears to me to be of doubtful authenticity.”
The letter, we are told, thoroughly upset its recipient. And I will tell you that there are a great many surprises in this story, and in all of them for that matter; with Arsène Lupin, the reader is well advised never to take things at face value.
I don’t know if I am giving you the full flavor of these marvelous stories. I had never read the Arsène Lupin stories until I found this Penguin book in my mystery bookstore quite recently. This volume contains 13 short stories, all of which have been fairly extensively footnoted to give the modern reader some taste for the cultural and political setting in which the stories take place. This Penguin volume, called simply Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief, by Maurice Leblanc, is a marvelous introduction to one of mystery fiction’s most fascinating and enduring characters.
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To listen to the original audio review, click here.
Next week: The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie
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