Author: Maurice Leblanc

Maurice Leblanc was born in 1864 in Rouen, France, and spent most of his early career writing the kind of literary realism his peers wrote: serious novels about provincial unhappiness, unread by anybody outside his immediate circle. Then in 1905 a magazine editor asked him to come up with a character to anchor a new monthly mystery feature, and he produced Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief. The first story sold out the issue. The second sold out the next one. Within a few years Lupin was the most popular fictional character in France, and Leblanc was no longer writing realism.Lupin himself is hard to summarize. He is a master of disguise, a polyglot, a thief who mostly robs from people who deserve it, a romantic, a patriot, a fugitive, and across the long arc of the books he ages, falls in love, fights in World War One, and reinvents himself a dozen times. Leblanc cheerfully borrowed devices from Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Conan Doyle, and at one point cheekily pitted Lupin against an undisguised Sherlock Holmes, which prompted a polite legal complaint and the name change to Herlock Sholmes for later editions.Leblanc kept writing Lupin until his death in 1941, twenty-one novels and short story collections in all, with the late books increasingly melancholy. He never quite escaped his own creation, but unlike Conan Doyle he seems to have made peace with that. The French government gave him the Legion of Honour. Modern readers still find Lupin in audiobooks, comics, animated series, and most recently the Netflix series Lupin, which uses the books as a kind of cultural inheritance for its modern Paris setting.