The Eight Strokes of the Clock

This 1923 collection sits a little outside the main Lupin canon. The hero here is Prince Rénine, which longtime readers will quickly recognize as one of Lupin’s many aliases, and he is paired with a young widow named Hortense Daniel. The structure is the gimmick. Eight stories, each tied to one strike of an old clock in Hortense’s family chateau, and each delivering a self-contained mystery that Rénine solves with his usual mix of charm and improvisation.

The mysteries themselves are smaller than Lupin’s grand heist plots. A missing servant. A kidnapping. A body in a frozen lake. A poisoning at a hunt. The pleasure is in the back-and-forth between Rénine and Hortense, which has more romantic-comedy energy than most Lupin books. A good pick if you like locked-room detection with a French setting and do not mind that Lupin himself is in light disguise the entire way through.