Maurice Leblanc

Arsene Lupin Maurice Leblanc

This title called Arsene Lupine first appeared in a series of stories published in the Je Sais Tout magazine, beginning with issue 6, in 1909. The complete series of novels written by Leblanc has twenty-three chapters, a literary descendant of Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail's Rocambole. Like him, Lupine is a character who operates from the wrong side of the law, and yet he is not evil, all those whom Lupine defeats, are, in any case, much worse villains than him. We can also find similarities with the character of A. J. Raffles, while anticipating and influencing later others such as El santo. It is possible that to create the character of Arsene Lupine, Leblanc was inspired by the figure of the French anarchist Marius Jacob, whose trial and imprisonment was very followed in March 1905. Leblanc had also read Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique (1901), by Octave Mirbeau, and had seen the comedy by the same author Scrupules (1902), both of which featured the figure of the white-gloved thief.