But why should readers always recognize him? We aren’t watching a familiar actor on a television series. (Actually a series might solve the problem of viewer recognition by having a different actor play Lupin in each episode.) At least Lupin doesn’t have the superhero peculiarity of Hamilton Cleek, “the Man with Forty Faces,” who appeared in 1910 and who suffers from a fortunately rare skin condition that renders his facial features pliable.

Leblanc employs a variety of narrators. The story may be recounted by Lupin’s nameless chronicler, a Watsonian admirer roughly conterminous with the author, and to whom Lupin remarks in Sherlockian mode, “My dear friend, you may have a certain skill at recounting my exploits, but sometimes you are a bit dense”; by some other person who witnessed key events; by a third-person narrator who holds his cards close to his vest and delights in trumping our expectations; by what seems to be the collective voice of the newspaper-reading public; or by Lupin himself. One story is told by Lupin’s friend until suddenly Lupin goes off without him—at which point the story abandons the narrator and follows the thief, who allegedly supplied details later.

In some stories he isn’t identified as Lupin at all. Because the scoundrel’s name is a household word, when attempting to rescue someone or perform some other noble deed he must not disclose his identity. It would be counterproductive for those in need to worry that their benefactor is actually scheming to profit from their misfortune. In one story you will learn that Arsène Lupin is not even his real name, but to say more now would be cheating. Often Lupin calls himself Horace Velmont. Some of his aliases are anagrams—Paul Sernine, for example. All of the stories in the third collection, 1921’s The Eight Strokes of the Clock, star one Prince Serge Renine, although Leblanc makes clear in a preface that Renine is Lupin. “But there comes a time when you cease to know yourself amid all these changes,” murmurs Lupin with a straight face, “and that is very sad.”

In the 1929 fifth collection, Arsène Lupin Intervenes, he appears as Jim Barnett, a private detective who admits that he is funded by none other than the notorious Lupin. But as his behavior indicates, and as Leblanc makes clear in another prefatory note, Barnett is merely a new persona for Lupin. Readers had clamored for the thief to turn his talents to detective work and Leblanc was trying to oblige. These later adventures are excellent detective stories, but the present edition concentrates on Lupin’s unlawful phase, as exhibited in the earlier collections, especially the first and second.

A consummate publicist, Lupin assures that his painstakingly cultivated reputation precedes him. When necessary he can score a psychological triumph merely by identifying himself at the perfect moment. A greed-driven thief might assume that anonymity would best serve his professional needs, but Lupin sees himself as an artist. He needs an audience. His saving grace as a character is that, like Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe, he is self-aware enough to admit his vanity and ambition. “You know what a fool Lupin can be,” admits Lupin to his friend; “the idea of appearing suddenly as a good genie and dazzling others would make him commit any number of offenses.”

A major stockholder in the Parisian newspaper Echo de France, for which his creator wrote, Lupin doesn’t hesitate to use his influence to run articles written about (or even by) himself. This particular Leblanc joke inverted an already established routine. From the genre’s inception, detectives employed the popular press to help them achieve their aims. It is a standard ploy for Sherlock Holmes to place an advertisement in a newspaper to entice a suspect—a trait, like so many others, that Conan Doyle pilfered from Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” C. Auguste Dupin employs a Le Monde advertisement to lure the sailor who has misplaced a homicidal orangutan. Usually, when Lupin’s latest caper receives its inevitable behind-the-scenes newspaper treatment, the public sympathizes with him. Leblanc’s devious method places the reader in the point-of-view of the other characters. It adds to our entertainment that they are not privy to one key fact in our own possession—that if Lupin isn’t visible onstage for awhile, he must be directing the action from the wings.

A theatrical metaphor seems apt. Lupin quickly made the metamorphosis from the page to the boards—and thence, of course, to the screen. Leblanc co-wrote the first dramatization, Arsène Lupin, with the popular playwright Francis de Croisset. In the summer of 1909 the many theatergoers who enjoyed it included Marcel Proust, who was diverting himself with baccarat in Cabourg and saw a production of the play in the theater of the Grand-Hotel.