"The Blonde Lady" sees Arsène Lupin (the gentleman-burglar) once again
meeting his enemy, the English detective Herlock Sholmes. These two
great intellects are bound in opposite directions, where one chooses to
abide to the law and the other uses his power and wits to crime. This
early work by Maurice Leblanc was originally published in 1908 and we
are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Maurice
Marie Émile Leblanc was born on 11th November 1864 in Rouen, Normandy,
France. He was a novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily
as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective, Arsène
Lupin. Leblanc spent his early education at the Lycée Pierre Corneille
(in Rouen), and after studying in several countries and dropping out of
law school, he settled in Paris and began to write fiction. From the
start, Leblanc wrote both short crime stories and longer novels - and
his lengthier tomes, heavily influenced by writers such as Flaubert and
Maupassant, were critically admired, but met with little commercial
success. Leblanc was largely considered little more than a writer of
short stories for various French periodicals when the first Arsène Lupin
story appeared. It was published as a series of stories in the magazine
'Je Sais Trout', starting on 15th 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. On this success, he later moved to a beautiful country-side
retreat in Étreat (in the Haute-Normandie region in north-western
France), which today is a museum dedicated to the Arsène Lupin books.
Leblanc was awarded the Légion d'Honneur - the highest decoration in
France - for his services to literature. He died in Perpignan (the
capital of the Pyrénées-Orientales department in southern France) on 6th
November 1941, at the age of seventy-six. He is buried in the
prestigious Montparnasse Cemetery of Paris.
