Lupin remains popular enough to have been resurrected for a late twentieth-century series written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, authors of the novels behind the films Les Diaboliques and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. There is a Japanese anime series called “Lupin III,” starring a decidedly illegitimate grandson of the man you will meet in this volume. Although there have been occasional reprints of a single collection, today in the United States Lupin is known mostly by die-hard fans willing to seek out used editions, and a critic’s complaint from 1945 is still true: “Leblanc’s contribution to the literature of crime is still sadly underestimated.”

This American neglect is inexplicable, because Lupin certainly shows up everywhere else. While planning her first detective novel during World War I, Agatha Christie considered and rejected the possibility of basing a detective upon Lupin, and Hercule Poirot may owe to the French thief some of his egotism and perhaps even his devotion to intuition over physical evidence. Christie also famously employed a very tricky narrator in one of her novels, and Leblanc is the king of tricky narrators. Georges Simenon, in his apprentice years of 1920-21—when he still thought of himself as a budding humorist in the Mark Twain mode—co-wrote with a friend a parody of Leblanc and Gaston Leroux, whose novels were being serialized in the Paris Gazette at the time. Jean Cocteau wrote in his diaries about reading the Lupin stories. Jean-Paul Sartre declared his affection for Lupin and called him “the Cyrano of the underworld.” Late in life T. S. Eliot remarked of Lupin, “I used to read him, but I have now graduated to Inspector Maigret,” which not all of us would consider a promotion.

Leblanc died in Perpignan, in southern France near the Spanish border. It was November 6, 1941 and he was a month shy of seventy-six. The same year, mystery writer and critic Ellery Queen proclaimed Lupin “the greatest thief in the whole world.” Arsène Lupin is the only character who appears twice in Queen’s pioneer anthology 101 Years’ Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories 1841—1941. He shows up among both the criminals and the detectives.

THE COMFORTABLE PROFESSION OF BURGLAR

We tend to imagine the period of the early Lupin stories as a simpler time—before the Russian Revolution, before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, before airborne bombing and poison gas ravaged Europe. After all, the French themselves coined the term le belle epoque for the relatively prosperous and serene time between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War I. When Leblanc began writing, no war had yet earned the adjective World.

Arsène Lupin’s era seems inescapably quaint to us—brave madmen piloting aeroplanes wobbly with extra wings, be-whiskered tycoons shouting into primitive telephones. Grand convertible automobiles still bore the evolutionary traces of their horse-drawn ancestors, and women moored their hats with scarves before recklessly climbing aboard. Sophisticates saw themselves as living in an age of speed. Telephones had surpassed the already miraculous telegraph, and transportation seemed to be catching up; reality had quickly outrun Jules Verne’s imaginary eighty days of circumnavigation. Wireless telegraphy plays a key role in the very first Lupin story, in which the narrator remarks, “The imagination no longer has the resource of picturing wires along which the invisible message glides; the mystery is even more insoluble, more poetic; and we must have recourse to the winds to explain the new miracle.” This lyrical aside demonstrates Leblanc’s unique tone of voice; like his hero, he notices the world around him.

Maurice Leblanc’s style reflects his dizzy epoch. Not for him the leisurely accounts of Wilkie (“make ‘em wait”) Collins or the exhaustively detailed investigations of his popular countryman Emile Gaboriau, whose Inspector Lecoq had helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle. Leblanc was a playwright. His stories open in media res and race forward without time for introspection. Seldom will you overhear his characters holding forth about society and anarchy, as they do in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which appeared at about the same time. (Chesterton’s novel does include, however, a remark about crime that could have been uttered by Lupin: “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may the more perfectly respect it.”) Not that Lupin lacks a philosophy of life. In fact he seems to feel that, like those ideal citizens described by Thoreau, he personally improves, revitalizes, and takes the measure of society.

The first Lupin adventures appeared in a popular periodical, surrounded by news stories, and are sometimes couched in the tone of a follow-up feature on some widely reported occurrence. “If you were a French newspaper-reader of pre-1914 Paris,” wrote the British critic William Vivian Butler, “you took your Lupin between sips of Pernod at cafe-tables on the boulevardes: you allowed him to entice your idle eye away from neighbouring columns about Bleriot’s channel-crossing or the assassination of the Archduke Charles.”

But a pretense of journalistic verisimilitude never demotes Leblanc’s writing to merely reportorial. His style is graceful, well-dressed, light on its feet. One of its most entertaining features is a reckless unpredictability. “There hangs over many of the Lupin stories,” wrote Butler, “a feeling that some kind of joke is being played on somebody, but so amazing is the author’s ingenuity, so incredible his sleight-of-hand, that you don’t really mind if that somebody should turn out to be you.” It’s true that the Lupin saga demands considerable suspension of disbelief as our hero dashes from one opaque masquerade to another, for Lupin is that versatile staple of early crime fiction, a master of disguise.