Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (Penguin Classics) (Annotated English Edition)

Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief [ISBN: 9780143104865 ] '-'
The inspiration for the new Netflix series, Lupin (2021), starring Omar Sy.

The suave adventures of a gentleman rogue —The Sherlock Holmes of Crime. Created by Maurice Leblanc during the early twentieth century, Arsène Lupin is a witty confidence man and burglar, The poor and innocent have nothing to fear from him; often they profit from his spontaneous generosity. The rich and powerful, and the detective who tries to spoil his fun, however, must beware. They are the target of Arsène’s mischief and tomfoolery. A masterful thief, his plans frequently evolve into elaborate capers, a precursor to such cinematic creations as 'Ocean’s Eleven' and 'The Sting'. Sparkling with amusing banter, these stories—the best of the Lupin series—are outrageous, melodramatic, and literate. ( ...)

M. Leblanc's creation, Gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin, is everything you would expect from a French aristocrat—witty, charming, brilliant, sly...and possibly the greatest thief in the world. A turn-of-the-century surprise hit when he first appeared in a short story, Lupin was created in response to the popularity of Sherlock Holmes. These stories—the best of the Lupin series—are outrageous, melodramatic, and literate, and they sparkle with amusing banter.

[About the Author]: Maurice Leblanc was born in Rouen, Normandy in December 11, 1864, where he was educated at the Lycee Pierre Corneille. After studying in several countries and dropping out of law school, he settled in Paris and began to write fiction, both short crime stories and longer novels; his novels (and stage plays), heavily influenced by writers like Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, were critically admired but met with little commercial success.

Leblanc frequents the great names and the literary circles in Paris: Stéphane Mallarmé, Alphonse Allais; Edmond de Goncourt, Jules Renard; Octave Mirbeau, Gaston Leroux, Alphonse Daudet, Émile Zola. (...) He is remembered today, however, for his dozens of inventive and amusing stories an novels about the masterful thief Arsène Lupin, a burgular and confidence man who eventually also becomes a detective. Leblanc created Lupin in 1905 for a series requested by a magazine editor. There were five collections of Lupin stories: Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar (1906), Arsène Lupin versus Sherlock Holmes (1908), The Confessions of Arsène Lupin (1912), The Eight Strokes of the Clock (1922), and Arsène Lupin Intervenes (1928).

Maurice Leblanc's work inspired Gaston Leroux (creator of Joseph Joséphin, nicknamed 'Rouletabille', from a detective novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room [AKA Le mystère de la chambre jaune] published in 1907), as well as Souvestre and Allain (creators of Fantômas). Arsène Lupin's exploits took place in the capital and in the country of Caux, which Maurice Leblanc knew well.

M. Leblanc was largely considered little more than a writer of short stories for various French periodicals when the first Arsène Lupin story appeared in a series of short stories serialized in the magazine Je Sais Tout, starting in No. 6, dated 15 July 1905. Clearly created at editorial request under the influence of, and in reaction to, the wildly successful Sherlock Holmes stories, the roguish and glamorous Lupin was a surprise success and Leblanc's fame and fortune beckoned. In total, Leblanc went on to write twenty-one Lupin novels or collections of short stories. The character of Lupin might have been based by Leblanc on French anarchist Marius Jacob, whose trial made headlines in March 1905; it is also possible that Leblanc had also read Octave Mirbeau's Les 21 jours d'un neurasthenique (1901), which features a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, and seen Mirbeau's comedy Scrupules (1902), whose main character is a gentleman thief. It was not influenced by Ernest William Hornung 's gentleman thief, A. J. Raffles, created in 1899, whom Leblanc had not read.

[The Translators]: Alexander Louis Teixeira de Mattos (April 9, 1865 – December 5, 1921), known as Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, was a Dutch-English journalist, literary critic and publisher, who gained his greatest fame as a translator. (...) Teixera de Mattos was fluent in English, French, German, Flemish, Dutch, and Danish. In addition to the later works of Maurice Maeterlinck, his translations include works by Émile Zola, Alexis de Tocqueville, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, François René de Chateaubriand, Paul Kruger, Carl Ewald, Georgette Leblanc, Stijn Streuvels, and Louis Couperus. He considered his greatest achievement to be his complete translation of Jean-Henri Fabre's natural history. [Wikipedia].

Michael Sims has edited two other collections for Penguin Classics: The Annotated Archy and Mehitable and "Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief". His research for the latter inspired The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime. His writing has appeared in New Statesman, Gourmet, Orion, the Washington Post, and many other periodicals in the United States and abroad.

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