Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-thief (Penguin Classics) Read online

  ARSÈNE LUPIN, GENTLEMAN-THIEF

  MAURICE LEBLANC was born in Rouen, France in 1864. He began his writing career with realistic works in the manner of his heroes Flaubert and Maupassant, producing such novels as La Femme in 1887. He is remembered today, however, for his dozens of inventive and amusing stories and novels about the masterful thief Arsène Lupin, a burglar 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 Herlock Sholmes (1908), The Confessions of Arsène Lupin (1912), The Eight Strokes of the Clock (1922), and Arsène Lupin Intervenes (1928). Leblanc wrote several Lupin novels; the best are The Hollow Needle (1908) and 813 (1910). Leblanc’s sister was Georgette Leblanc, the popular actress who was mistress and later wife of the playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Leblanc was also a playwright, co-authoring the first stage version of Lupin adventures, which launched a century of theatrical and cinematic adaptations. Leblanc was awarded the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor. He died in Perpignan in 1941.

  MICHAEL SIMS is the author of Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Science Book, and Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts. He has written for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Statesman, and American Archaeology. For Penguin Classics he also edited The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel. His Web site is www.michaelsimsbooks.com.

  MAURICE LEBLANC

  Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief

  Introduction and Notes by

  MICHAEL SIMS

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  First published in Penguin Books 2007

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Introduction copyright © Michael Sims, 2007

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Leblanc, Maurice, 1864–1941.

  [Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur. English]

  Arsèene Lupin, gentleman-thief / Maurice Leblanc ; introduction and notes by Michael Sims.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  I. Sims, Michael, 1958– II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ2623.E24A77213 2007

  843 .912—dc22 2006047479

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  ISBN: 978-0-14-192982-8

  Contents

  Introduction: The Musical Sound of Breaking the Law

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  ARSÈNE LUPIN, GENTLEMAN-THIEF

  The Arrest of Arsène Lupin

  Arsèene Lupin in Prison

  The Escape of Arsène Lupin

  The Mysterious Railway Passenger

  The Queen’s Necklace

  Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late

  Flashes of Sunlight

  The Wedding-ring

  The Red Silk Scarf

  Edith Swan-neck

  On the Top of the Tower

  Thérèse and Germaine

  At the Sign of Mercury

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  The Musical Sound of Breaking the Law

  “The criminal is the creative artist, the detective only the critic.”

  This observation by a character in one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories sums up the attitude of the most entertaining felon in literature—Arsène Lupin. Created by Maurice Leblanc during the first decade of the twentieth century, uniting the traditions of gentleman rogue and heroic adventurer, this witty confidence man and burglar is the Sherlock Holmes of criminals. In several stories (the first of which is included in this collection), Leblanc borrowed Holmes for a few clashes with Lupin, who outwits the great detective at every turn—and even steals his watch.

  Lupin is a rogue, not a villain. The poor and the innocent have nothing to fear from him; often they profit from his spontaneous generosity. Parvenu and predator, however, tremble as they double-check their safe deposit boxes at the Credit Lyon-nais. The gendarmerie flounder behind like baying hounds, with one Inspector Ganimard serving as Lupin’s particular foil. Poor Ganimard finds himself the butt of newspaper stories extolling Lupin’s intelligence over his own—and then, in “The Red Silk Scarf,” finds Lupin teasingly lobbing him clues toward solving a crime. The reader can rest assured that Lupin hasn’t suddenly developed a sense of civic duty; he will profit from the solution.

  This hybrid adventure marks Lupin’s turn toward detective work, which would occupy the bulk of the last two of the five collections that Leblanc wrote about him. The present volume includes several stories from this later period, but emphasizes the early adventures, during which Lupin remains the prince of thieves. Although almost every one of the short Lupin adventures deserves republication, the present volume admits only the creme de la creme from each collection, resulting in the first “best of” overview of Lupin in English. Although each adventure stands alone, some refer to each other and develop themes, so the best way to read them is in order of publication, as reprinted here.

  THE CYRANO OF THE UNDERWORLD

  Maurice Marie Emile Leblanc was born December n, 1864 in Rouen to an Italian father and a French mother who died young. He was educated in Berlin and Manchester. Although Leblanc earned a law degree and performed the requisite stint in the family shipping business, he was restless for more. He wrote several realistic novels in the vein of Flaubert and Maupassant, beginning in 1893 with A Woman, attracting modest critical praise but little financial success. In time he drifted into journalism and began to be known for his magazine stories and articles.

  The Lupin stories first appeared in a new periodical called Je Sais Tout. It was patterned somewhat on the hugely successful Strand magazine in London, a forerunner of twentieth-century periodicals that promised the re
volutionary lure of a picture on every page. The Strand was the venue for the astonishingly popular Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle had published two longer Holmes adventures that attracted little more than warehouse dust and curt dismissal (“shilling dreadful”) until he published the first Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in the newly launched Strand in 1891. Fourteen years later Pierre Lafitte, the editor of Je Sais Tout, asked Maurice Leblanc to contribute a story of adventure along the same lines. Leblanc later claimed that he sat down without an idea in his head and found Arsène Lupin on the page. The first story, “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” proved instantly popular.

  “Keep it up,” urged Lafitte. “Give us more tales about Arsène Lupin and you may have as much success as Conan Doyle has had with those Sherlock Holmes stories.”

  “But I can’t keep it up,” protested Leblanc. “Lupin has been arrested!”

  “Bah! Think it over.” And Lafitte uttered an important sentence in the history of crime fiction: “Lupin is worth saving.”

  Leblanc agreed to save him. But how? He had begun the series with his audacious hero’s arrest. Should he ignore this development and write about events that occurred earlier? No, if Lupin were so brilliant, surely he could find a way out of this situation. In his second Lupin story, “Arsène Lupin in Prison,” Leblanc wrote a funny and ingenious classic of crime fiction and further defined his hero’s character and personality. Readers could see that it would take more than mere incarceration to halt Lupin’s career. Then, establishing his habit of writing a series of interconnected stories that read like chapters in a novel, Leblanc topped this performance with a third story, in which Lupin escapes. “I grew to like the fellow,” remembered the author fondly. He gathered the first nine stories into a collection, Arsène-Lupin, Gentleman-Cambrioleur (Burglar), in 1906. Lupin was a burglar one day and a con man the next, so the present volume gathers his adventures under the more inclusive term thief.

  Maurice Leblanc was not the only accomplished member of his family. His sister Georgette grew up to become a popular actress and singer, companion (at first while married to someone else), wife, and widow of the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and the woman for whom he wrote numerous plays. The familial relationship with Maeterlinck may have contributed to Leblanc’s polished and successful plays, and it unquestionably led to an important collaboration. Leblanc’s best translator, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who translated all of the stories in the present volume, is primarily known as Maeterlinck’s usual translator. Teixeira de Mattos was a versatile man who translated from Danish, German, Dutch, and other languages, but most of his translations are of French writers such as Maeterlinck and the pioneer naturalist J.-Henri Fabre. He was also the unofficial head of a London organization called the Lutetian Society, which included among its members the influential translator Ernest Dowson. Like Sir Richard Burton’s Kama Shastra Society, the Lutetian was a small, private nonprofit organization that published unexpurgated editions—often new translations—of banned books, including Zola’s.

  In their native French and in other languages, including English as translated by Teixeira de Mattos and others, the Lupin tales were wildly popular. They sold prodigiously and inspired plays and eventually movies, beginning with a silent one in 1917 and including the latest installment as recently as 2004. Leblanc wound up with the ribbon of the Legion d’Honneur. The Lupin saga has never been out of print in France, where he is as well known as Sherlock Holmes. 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. 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.