How odd to imagine the profound and verbose Proust sitting in the audience of a play written by the blithe and concise Leblanc, but one trait they have in common is an omnipresent irony. Moreover, an aspect of crime fiction— besides its plethora of unreliable narrators—that would later make it a pet form of the nouvelle roman is its emphasis on structure, always one of Proust’s chief concerns.

THE BELLE EPOQUE OF CRIME

Lupin’s own humor is omnipresent. The stories are outrageous, melodramatic, and literate, and they sparkle with amusing banter. When he explains that he is posing as an ex-cabinet minister, Lupin adds, “I had to select a rather overstocked profession, so as not to attract attention.” Often he speaks of himself in the third-person: “Lupin juggles deductions like a detective in a flashy novel.” On one occasion he thinks, “I sometimes ask myself why everybody doesn’t choose the comfortable profession of a burglar. Given a little skill and reflective power, there’s nothing more charming.”

The thief taunts his intended victims as well as the police. In one story he writes letters from prison inviting a wealthy banker to ship his art collection to him rather than cause Lupin the trouble of stealing it—and he adds that the larger Watteau in the dining room is a forgery. His frequent laugh is the triumphant guffaw of Robin Hood once more outwitting the Sheriff of Nottingham. An outrageous sense of play underlies every caper. Lupin strategizes with the zest of a novelist, foreseeing alternatives and accommodating them in advance. He flouts rules because rules constrict. “By Jove, I wouldn’t sell this moment for a fortune!” he exclaims when anyone else might simply abandon the (illicit) task at hand. “Who dares pretend that life is monotonous?”

Such irreverent glee shows up in other great outlaws, although not quite to Lupin’s manic extent. Edwardian criminals had little patience with Victorian standards of good behavior, and during the first decades of the new century brash rogues were rampant. Guy Boothby created the aristocratic thief Simon Carne in 1897. The same year, Grant Allen published his superb interconnected stories about confidence man Colonel Clay and united them in An African Millionaire. In 1899 E. W. Hor-nung published the first half-dozen Raffles stories in Cassell’s magazine. Although he is the best known of all this crew, largely because Hornung was such a fine writer, Raffles was actually a small-time thief, repeatedly demonstrating that he deserved the adjective in the first collection’s title, The Amateur Cracksman.

In 1902., writing under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown, R. Austin Freeman—creator of the first great scientific detective, Dr. Thorndyke—and John James Pitcairn launched a series about a gentleman thief named Romney Pringle. Soon after the debut of Father Brown in 1911, G. K. Chesterton supplied the death-attracting curate with a recurring adversary, master thief Flambeau, about whose artistic talent for crime both author and detective wax poetic. The only American of this period who compares with British and continental thieves, Frederick Irving Anderson’s Godahl (nicknamed “the Infallible,” probably by himself), enjoys nothing in life more than outwitting someone who is trying to outwit him. Jeff Peters, the con man in O. Henry’s 1908 collection The Gentle Grafter—although penny-ante compared even with Raffles—particularly enjoys gulling a bumpkin who is out to take advantage of the stranger in town.

“He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans,” says O. Henry of Peters; “he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars.” Scoundrels real and fictional found such a guise useful, in an era when Pittsburgh moguls were building castles out of the lives of coal miners, when the latest millionaire in London might have been cracking the whip a month before over diamond sifters in Kimberly. Readers gradually discover that Grant Allen’s sly “colonel” is waging a war against Gilded Age hubris as much as replenishing his own coffers, and Allen’s stroke of genius was to have his thief repeatedly target the same victim.