The Extraordinary Adventures Of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-thief

• About the book

The creator of the Arsene Lupin, Maurice Leblanc, was born in Rouen in 1864. At the request of a Paris magazine, Je Sais Tout, he began a series of stories featuring the character Lupin, a 'gentleman thief', which appeared in this publication, starting in 1907. The blueprint for this new magazine was England's Strand Magazine in which Conan Doyle had first introduced his character Sherlock Holmes. So, Lupin was to be the French Sherlock Holmes and indeed became as famous, if not more so in French realms, than his English counterpart. The stories were wildly successful and later led to plays, TV adaptations and movies. The most memorable of these adaptations for an anglophone audience being the recent (but ongoing) Netflix series 'Lupin', starring Omar Sy. However, before this, in 1919 Agatha Christie reportedly considered basing her first detective on Lupin. Jean Cocteau wrote about the stories in his diaries, Sartre described Lupin as 'the Cyrano of the underworld.' When Leblanc died