Maurice Leblanc

• Born: December 11, 1864
• Birthplace: Rouen, France
• Died: November 6, 1941
• Place of death: Perpignan, France

Type of Plot: Inverted

Principal Series: Arsène Lupin, 1905-1941

Contribution

Undoubtedly, Maurice Leblanc’s most important contribution to the mystery and detective genre was his creation of the extraordinary Arsène Lupin, the quintessential criminal-detective. Leblanc’s focus on his character, who dons many disguises throughout the series and who functions as both criminal and hero, raises fundamental questions concerning truth and value, and their uncertainty in a basically unjust world. Jean-Jacques Tourteau, the author of a major critical study of Lupin, has identified the key devices that Leblanc employed in his crime fiction and that have influenced other writers in the genre: First, Leblanc conferred on his protagonist, Lupin, a histrionic character, especially in making him a “quick-change artist”; second, Lupin is a master at manipulating his victims; third, Leblanc, in like fashion, manipulates the reader; fourth, Leblanc especially uses setting to do so, choosing details that subliminally suggest psychological nuances to the reader; and fifth, Leblanc sustains suspense by delaying the progress of the narration except in cases in which immediate action is necessary.

The impact of the Lupin series is attested by the many critical studies that Leblanc’s protagonist has engendered. There are even two journals devoted to the topic: the Revue des études lupiniennes and the periodical publication of the Société des Études Lupiniennes, founded in 1965.

Biography

Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc was born in Rouen, Normandy, France, in 1864. He was the son of Émile Leblanc, an ironworker and builder of boats, who was partly of Italian descent, and of a mother who came of an old Norman family. Maurice had two sisters, Georgette and Johanna. Georgette was a restless girl, scornful of the bourgeois mode of life, who at seventeen went to Paris and became an actress at the Opéra Comique. Attracted to the writings of the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, she pursued him and in 1895 became his amoureuse, a relationship that lasted until 1914.

As a boy, Leblanc was noted for his scholarship, his fervid imagination, and the pleasure he took in the landscape around Rouen. A student at the Lycée Corneille and the Pension Patry, he won many scholastic prizes. On the completion of his secondary studies, he took a job with the firm of Miroude-Pichard in Rouen, which manufactured cards. Whenever he had time on his hands, he practiced writing. It was soon evident that he was not meant for the card business, so he decided to go to Paris to study law.

On completion of his law studies, Leblanc returned to Rouen and entered into the family business of boat building. He soon decided, however, that he was best suited to be a writer. He began to write psychological fiction critical of certain bourgeois values. His first novel in this vein was Une Femme (1893). Other similar works followed; although only moderately successful in terms of sales, these works at least served to introduce him to the world of letters. To earn a living he took up journalism.

Leblanc’s real success began with the feuilleton publication of the short story “L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin” (“The Arrest of Arsène Lupin) in Je sais tout (July 15, 1905). In this story, he introduced for the first time his extraordinary creation, Arsène Lupin. The story proved popular, and other stories about Arsène Lupin followed during 1906-1907. These stories were then collected to make up the first volume of the series, Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (1907; The Exploits of Arsène Lupin, 1907; also known as The Seven of Hearts and The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar). Leblanc now devoted himself almost entirely to recording the adventures of his criminal-hero, who appeared in twenty novels or collections of short stories, the last of the series appearing in 1941. Concurrently, Leblanc wrote some ten volumes of detective-mysteries or suspense novels that were independent of the Lupin series. He also from time to time produced the kind of psychological fiction with which he had begun his career.

When not engaged in the art of writing, Leblanc read the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Honoré de Balzac, played chess, and cycled through the countryside. A photograph of Leblanc, taken perhaps when he was in his forties, discloses a not unhandsome face with dark gimletlike eyes, a prominent Roman nose, a mouth largely concealed by a scraggly handlebar mustache, and a strong chin. Altogether he appears more Italian than French.

Leblanc died at the home of his son in Perpignan, Vichy, France, on November 6, 1941, two weeks after the death of Georgette. He apparently died as the result of a chill that he had taken on the unheated train he had ridden to visit his son.

Analysis

The English author E. W. Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, anticipated Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin by creating his criminal-hero Raffles, the “Gentleman Cracksman,” in his The Amateur Cracksman (1899). Doyle himself was opposed to Hornung’s idea and admonished him, saying, “You must not make the criminal a hero.” Julian Symons has stated that the Raffles tales of Hornung and the Lupin tales of Leblanc “represent the last flicker for a long time of the criminal hero tradition.”

France in the belle époque was undergoing a time of change and flux by virtue of increasing industrialization, improved communications, and new technology. Because the haute bourgeoisie of France were unwilling to make the concessions necessary to ease the hardships of displaced artisans and exploited workers, new political and economic theories supportive of political and social reforms were bandied about by conflicting interests. The frustration of some also brought about new, antitheological moralities that negated the moralities of church and state. Some of the new moralities were individualistic, others were cooperative and collective; but principally they were anti-God, antichurch, antistate, and antibourgeois. They issued from such thinkers as William Godwin, Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, Emma Goldman, and Émile Armand.

In his treatise Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?, 1876), French socialist Proudhon answered: “La propriété, c’est la vol” (property is theft). The anarchists of the so-called Bonnot Gang (c. 1911) defined theft as “individual reprisals against the bourgeoisie.” The French word bourgeois (or bourgeoisie) has no English equivalent. Rather than meaning simply “a member of the middle class” or “any person owning property,” it implies a certain attitude assumed by a property owner or by one ambitious to own property—namely, that material possessions and money are to that person the most important thing in life. To socialists and anarchists, all bourgeois were criminals. Nevertheless, in France not all men of property were regarded as necessarily bourgeois; those who carried their wealth lightly and were not cesspools of cupidity were not bourgeois. The view that all bourgeois were by definition criminals was not confined to any particular social class. Although laborers and artisans were most likely to hold such a view, it ran the gamut of the social hierarchy.

During the belle époque and later, thousands of Frenchmen could respond favorably to the sort of criminal-hero represented by Lebanc’s creation, Arsène Lupin. Lupin, born Raoul d’Andrésy, never knew his father, who died in prison in the United States before Lupin was born. Lupin’s mother, Henriette, supported herself and Lupin as maid to a countess. When the precocious Lupin, at the age of six, stole the famous “queen’s necklace” from the countess’s husband to arrange lifetime financial stability for Henriette, the countess accused Henriette of the robbery and dismissed her. Henriette died six years later, leaving her twelve-year-old son to fend for himself. Lupin prepared himself for a career as a professional burglar, eventually becoming known as “the man of a thousand disguises,” operating in châteaux, grands salons, and transatlantic liners.

Lupin’s motivation, aside from the delight he takes in baffling the police and executing complex robberies, is to avenge himself on the money-grubbing bourgeoisie. Lupin eschews violence and murder, but he considers all bourgeois thieves. His aplomb, debonairness, snobbery, dandyism, and finesse are designed to demonstrate to the bourgeois that he is inherently an aristocrat. In L’Aiguille creuse (1909; The Hollow Needle, 1910), it is hinted that he is descended from royalty. From the standpoint of the philosophy of morals, however, Lupin is a casuist, a François Villon, who seeks to convince the noble old warrior, the seigneur of Brisetout, that he is no better than the poet-thief. Lupin, too, is an artist who practices robbery as a fine art.

Arsène in Prison

Tourteau has pointed out that the Lupinian stories and novels are not constructed around a murder but around an “enigma” of the planning and execution of a crime. From Lupin’s point of view, the enigma consists of a problem that he must solve: how to execute a seemingly impossible robbery. To solve this problem, Lupin must devise a plan, adopt the role of detective to test it, and perform as an artist in its execution. Part of the execution will involve the manipulation of the victim. Such a manipulation occurs in “Arsène in Prison” in The Exploits of Arsène Lupin. To rob the wealthy retired financier and art collector Baron “Satan” Cahorn, Lupin must manipulate his victim if he is ever to gain admittance to the baron’s impenetrable stronghold, located in the middle of the Lower Seine. Knowing well the cupidity of the baron, Lupin devises a plan that will play on this weakness.

With the strategy of gaining entrance to the fort, Lupin plots a sequence of tactical moves, each of which will advance the progress toward this end by a predictable action on the part of the baron according to Lupin’s own calculus of probabilities. It is all very much like the playing of a chess game. Lupin begins with the gambit of a letter to the baron threatening robbery unless his terms are met. Then the editor of the local newspaper is made to notify readers of the presence of Ganimard, who put Lupin in prison. Denied assistance by the authorities at Rouen, the baron seeks to hire Ganimard, who declines. Lupin sends a telegram to the baron, who attempts to hire Ganimard again. This time he offers him a large sum of money, and Ganimard agrees. He advises the baron to dismiss his servants before he arrives at the castle. On the eve of Lupin’s proposed robbery—in his letter he named the precise date—Ganimard and two strong men arrive at the castle to stay overnight and guard the baron’s treasures. During the night the robbery takes place, but it is not discovered until daybreak. The guards appear to have been drugged. The baron is beside himself. He declares that he will pay a huge sum to retrieve his stolen things. Ganimard tells him that is a sensible approach and promises to look into such a possibility. The baron informs the authorities that he has been robbed by Arsène Lupin. When their investigation fails, they seek the assistance of the Paris Sûreté. Although its agents arrive on the scene, their investigation, too, seems to be getting nowhere. Ganimard suggests to the baron that the one man who might help in this matter is Lupin himself.

The reader does not know that this Ganimard is an impostor. This is revealed only when the real Ganimard visits Lupin in his cell at La Santé in Paris to inquire of him whether he has any knowledge of the Cahorn affair—just as the false Ganimard had told the baron he intended to do; hence, the visit of the real Ganimard was another prediction in Lupin’s calculus of probabilities. Lupin confesses to Ganimard that the whole Cahorn robbery has been masterminded by him. He also informs Ganimard, however, that the baron’s charges against him will soon be dropped, for the baron’s stolen treasures have already been returned to him for the sum of 100,000 francs. This money will be beneficial to him, Lupin says, in his charitable activities. In short, Lupin saw from the first that the only way to gain entrance to the fortified château was to have its owner invite him in. Every move that Lupin made had led to a predictable action on the part of the baron, the victim of Lupin’s manipulation. The guards had not been drugged; they had passed the baron’s treasures to their confederate outside, who took them away in his car. Then the guards had taken a sleeping potion. Lupin’s plan had worked to perfection.

While Arsène Lupin is manipulating his victim and sometimes other characters, Leblanc is manipulating his reader. His principal method is the concealment of the true identities of characters from the reader until the end of the narrative. This concealment is accomplished by introducing the characters to the reader under false identities and allowing the reader to retain the misperception until the end of the narrative, when their true identities are disclosed. In “Arsène in Prison,” the identities of the robbers of Baron Cahorn are concealed from the reader by the presentation of them as police officers.

“The Arrest of Arsène Lupin”

In “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” the story that opens The Exploits of Arsène Lupin, the identity of the protagonist-narrator (the narrative point of view is first-person singular), Monsieur d’Andrésy, a young man of the world traveling to America aboard a transatlantic liner, is in petto until after the ship has docked in New York Harbor. Then the reader learns that M. d’Andrésy is actually Arsène Lupin. This sort of deception was used later by Agatha Christie in her controversial detective-mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Christie was accused by critics of not being fair to the reader and came close to being expelled from the Detection Club of London.

Eight Strokes of the Clock

Leblanc utilized enclosure (le local clos), whether by fence, boxlike casing, or wall (with or without door, window, and lock, as a protective wall or a locked room) in a casual manner but with the motive of producing a kind of subliminal psychological effect on the reader. That is, he appears to attach no importance to the enclosure described while at the same time he seeks to leave a definite impression on the reader’s mind. For example, in Les Huit Coups de l’horloge (1922; Eight Strokes of the Clock, 1922) the protagonist, Sernine-Lupin, and Hortense force the door to enter a room that has remained closed for twenty years. On their entrance, the clock begins to tick and immediately strikes eight times. How could such an event transpire? The mechanism of this eight-day clock would permit but one movement a week. The truth is that the mechanism of the clock has been blocked for twenty years by the weapon used to commit a crime. The blows used to force the door unblocked the mechanism, the gravitational pull of the falling weights produced power, the pendulum and its escapement began to act and ticked, and the clock’s hammer hit the bell eight times, signaling the time the crime took place. At the same time, the ticking of the sprocket wheel of the clock set in motion “the spirit of Lupin,” who would later reconstruct the crime that had taken place twenty years before.

The Crystal Stopper

Deductive reasoning figures in all the adventures of Lupin, although it is not always very rigorous. It serves to establish connections between the author and the reader. Leblanc’s narrative is constructed in such a manner that the reader’s efforts to figure things out will be confirmed some pages later if they are correct. In Le Bouchon de cristal (1912; The Crystal Stopper, 1913), the reader eventually learns that the list of the Twenty-seven has been hidden in the pack of Maryland tobacco that Daubrecq smokes. Later, the reader learns that this list is a forgery because the paper on which it is written lacks the watermark of the Lorraine cross. Later still, the reader learns that the genuine list has been concealed in the hollowed crystal stopper that Daubrecq has worn as a glass eye. Unlike most mystery and detective writers, who reserve logical explanation for the conclusion of a story, Leblanc plants logical explanations throughout his account of the course of events. Lupin’s deductive reasoning depends more on intuition than on logical procedure, the latter process being reserved to confirm for the reader the soundness of the intuitively arrived-at hypotheses. Lupin always divines the truth before the other fictional characters and discovers it in advance of the reader in most cases. He dislikes employing material indices and is scornful of the empirical method. He loves the free play of the intellect.

Leblanc’s protagonist Lupin operates both as a criminal and as a detective. As the books of the Lupinian series appeared—from The Exploits of Arsène Lupin in 1907 to Les Milliards d’Arsène Lupin in 1941—Leblanc’s presentation of his hero roughly went through three stages. From 1907 to 1913 or 1914, Lupin’s criminal activities are stressed; he is simply the dashing young gentleman-burglar. From about 1915 to 1919, however, his efforts to assist the official police in pursuing criminals by correcting the police’s errors are stressed. Finally, from about 1922 to the conclusion of the series, the emphasis shifts to Lupin’s activities as a detective; he cooperates almost openly with the official police to help them catch criminals who are especially malign. Surely Leblanc’s changes in emphasis in the presentation of his hero reflect historical conditions in France that altered the prevailing attitudes of the French public toward government during successive phases of their history: the prewar period; the period of the Great War, 1914-1918; and the postwar period that led to France’s defeat by the Germans and the fall of the Third Republic in 1940. Leblanc’s writing career spanned the belle époque and the fin de siècle, but it also encompassed the avant-garde and the birth of modernism. His canon reflects this social evolution.

Principal Series Characters:

• Arsène Lupin is a master gentleman-burglar who is anathema to the French bourgeoisie but a hero to the working class. Lupin abhors murder, never carries a lethal weapon, and sometimes assists the police in catching violent criminals.
• Inspector Ganimard of the Sûreté (the Parisian equivalent of London’s Scotland Yard) is Lupin’s nemesis. Each, nevertheless, admires and respects the other.
• Holmlock Shears (a.k.a.
• Sherlock Holmes ), the famous British detective, who fiercely pursues Lupin.

Bibliography

Morain, Alfred. The Underworld of Paris: Secrets of the Sûreté. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1931. Nonfictional study of crime and criminals in Paris; useful background for understanding Leblanc’s Lupin tales.

Murch, Alme E. The Development of the Detective Novel. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958. Broad overview of the detective novel and of Leblanc’s place in its history.

Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. Provides perspective for understanding Leblanc’s work.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Les Origines du Roman Policier: A Wartime Wireless Talk to the French. Translated by Suzanne Bray. Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, England: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2003. Address to the French by the famous English mystery author, discussing the history of French detective fiction and its relation to the English version of the genre.

Sims, Michael. Introduction to Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Thief. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Overview of Leblanc’s works and discussion of his most famous creation, written to accompany this reprint edition of the author’s earliest Lupin story.