Although each adventure stands alone, some refer to each other and develop themes, so the best way to read them is in order of publication, as reprinted here.

THE CYRANO OF THE UNDERWORLD

Maurice Marie Emile Leblanc was born December n, 1864 in Rouen to an Italian father and a French mother who died young. He was educated in Berlin and Manchester. Although Leblanc earned a law degree and performed the requisite stint in the family shipping business, he was restless for more. He wrote several realistic novels in the vein of Flaubert and Maupassant, beginning in 1893 with A Woman, attracting modest critical praise but little financial success. In time he drifted into journalism and began to be known for his magazine stories and articles.

The Lupin stories first appeared in a new periodical called Je Sais Tout. It was patterned somewhat on the hugely successful Strand magazine in London, a forerunner of twentieth-century periodicals that promised the revolutionary lure of a picture on every page. The Strand was the venue for the astonishingly popular Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle had published two longer Holmes adventures that attracted little more than warehouse dust and curt dismissal (“shilling dreadful”) until he published the first Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in the newly launched Strand in 1891. Fourteen years later Pierre Lafitte, the editor of Je Sais Tout, asked Maurice Leblanc to contribute a story of adventure along the same lines. Leblanc later claimed that he sat down without an idea in his head and found Arsène Lupin on the page. The first story, “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” proved instantly popular.

“Keep it up,” urged Lafitte. “Give us more tales about Arsène Lupin and you may have as much success as Conan Doyle has had with those Sherlock Holmes stories.”

“But I can’t keep it up,” protested Leblanc. “Lupin has been arrested!”

“Bah! Think it over.” And Lafitte uttered an important sentence in the history of crime fiction: “Lupin is worth saving.”

Leblanc agreed to save him. But how? He had begun the series with his audacious hero’s arrest. Should he ignore this development and write about events that occurred earlier? No, if Lupin were so brilliant, surely he could find a way out of this situation. In his second Lupin story, “Arsène Lupin in Prison,” Leblanc wrote a funny and ingenious classic of crime fiction and further defined his hero’s character and personality. Readers could see that it would take more than mere incarceration to halt Lupin’s career. Then, establishing his habit of writing a series of interconnected stories that read like chapters in a novel, Leblanc topped this performance with a third story, in which Lupin escapes. “I grew to like the fellow,” remembered the author fondly. He gathered the first nine stories into a collection, Arsène-Lupin, Gentleman-Cambrioleur (Burglar), in 1906. Lupin was a burglar one day and a con man the next, so the present volume gathers his adventures under the more inclusive term thief.

Maurice Leblanc was not the only accomplished member of his family. His sister Georgette grew up to become a popular actress and singer, companion (at first while married to someone else), wife, and widow of the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and the woman for whom he wrote numerous plays. The familial relationship with Maeterlinck may have contributed to Leblanc’s polished and successful plays, and it unquestionably led to an important collaboration. Leblanc’s best translator, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who translated all of the stories in the present volume, is primarily known as Maeterlinck’s usual translator. Teixeira de Mattos was a versatile man who translated from Danish, German, Dutch, and other languages, but most of his translations are of French writers such as Maeterlinck and the pioneer naturalist J.-Henri Fabre. He was also the unofficial head of a London organization called the Lutetian Society, which included among its members the influential translator Ernest Dowson. Like Sir Richard Burton’s Kama Shastra Society, the Lutetian was a small, private nonprofit organization that published unexpurgated editions—often new translations—of banned books, including Zola’s.

In their native French and in other languages, including English as translated by Teixeira de Mattos and others, the Lupin tales were wildly popular. They sold prodigiously and inspired plays and eventually movies, beginning with a silent one in 1917 and including the latest installment as recently as 2004. Leblanc wound up with the ribbon of the Legion d’Honneur. The Lupin saga has never been out of print in France, where he is as well known as Sherlock Holmes.