Arsène Lupin

Maurice Leblanc created Arsène Lupin in 1905 for a magazine assignment, and over the next thirty-five years he wrote twenty-one novels and short story collections featuring the gentleman thief. The series does not follow a strict reading order. Some books are tight short story collections in the early Sherlock Holmes mode. Others, like 813 and The Hollow Needle and The Teeth of the Tiger, are long novels with complex multi-country plots. A few are wartime adventures with Lupin in disguise. The character ages across the series in roughly real time, falls in and out of love repeatedly, loses people he cares about, and never quite stops outrunning the French police. The books selected here include 813, often called the best Lupin novel, the cheerful Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes, the WWI-era L'Éclat d'Obus, the locked-room collection The Eight Strokes of the Clock, and the late international adventure The Teeth of the Tiger. They give a strong cross-section of Leblanc's range without committing you to the full canon.