This early work by Maurice Leblanc was originally published in 1919 and
we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. In
"The Secret of Sarek," the action takes place almost entirely on the
fictional Island of Sarek in 1917, in which Leblanc deftly blends crime
fantasy and science fiction. 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.
