"The Golden Triangle" as another fantastic mystery by Leblanc featuring
gentleman thief arsène Lupin. It takes place during World War I and
wounded warrior Patrice Belval is in love with his nurse. This early
work by Maurice Leblanc was originally published in 1918 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.
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. He died in Perpignan (the capital of the
Pyrénées-Orientales department in southern France) on 6th November 1941,
at the age of seventy-six.
