"The Confessions of Arsène Lupin" is a collection of nine stories - or
confessions - of the celebrated gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. This early
work by Maurice Leblanc was originally published in 1913 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.
