The Hollow Needle
When a young detective sets out to expose Arsene Lupin, the chase leads to one of France’s oldest secrets. Isidore Beautrelet, a brilliant schoolboy with a gift for deduction, follows a trail of ciphers and clues toward the meaning of the Hollow Needle, a mystery said to have guarded the treasure of French kings since the days of Julius Caesar. Maurice Leblanc turns his usual formula on its head, letting Lupin play the hunted for once as his sharp-witted rival closes in. Serialized in 1908 and 1909, the novel wraps the real cliffs of Etretat around its puzzle and stands among Leblanc’s most admired books. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, it is free here as a PDF and EPUB edition.
About the Author
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…
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Listen to The Hollow Needle Audiobook Free
Listen to The Hollow Needle by Maurice Leblanc free online. The full audiobook (6 hr 59 min, 10 chapters, read by volunteer narrators) streams free on this page.
The Hollow Needle (1909) is a public domain work.
| # | Chapter | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Shot | 43:00 | |
| 2 | Isidore Beautrelet, Sixth-form Schoolboy | 53:52 | |
| 3 | The Corpse | 39:48 | |
| 4 | Face to Face | 49:53 | |
| 5 | On the Track | 31:08 | |
| 6 | An Historic Secret | 33:48 | |
| 7 | The Treatise of the Needle | 47:11 | |
| 8 | From Caesar to Lupin | 31:57 | |
| 9 | Open, Sesame! | 40:47 | |
| 10 | The Treasures of the Kings of France | 47:29 |
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