Book #25

Arsene Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur

Maurice LeBlanc

Yes, a second book about the great French burglar, Arsene Lupin.  This time though it was in the original French.  I have not had so much fun reading a book in a long time.  It took me several pages to get back into the way of reading French with any speed, and it was hard sometimes to pick it up and get going again, but as I read it, the transition become easier and easier and I also found myself learning more and more new French words.  I learned French 30 years ago, but I do not have a very large vocabulary and increasing my vocabulary is always a nice treat.  Though I do worry that I might be learning Victorian era words that are no longer in use in current French.

This volume is more of a collection of short stories, but the stories are related, at least most of them.  We see Arsene on a ship, and being saved by a young lady, though saved is a relative term.  He is arrested, but outsmarts the police to secure his release.  He then returns to his usual sort of crimes, though we see his very first theft, and finally at the end, we see him solve a rather tricky problem to find a way in to commit a crime and then he recants his crime for the sake of the same lady that he met on the boat in the first story.

Now, this final problem, which involves finding a lost secret passageway also involves the famous English detective, Herlock Sholmes.  Obviously, this is not much of an attempt to hide the identity of the detective he is borrowing from Arthur Conan Doyle, and LeBlanc does a pretty good job of presenting Sholmes in an accurate way.  Not entirely accurate, but close enough for those with a casual acquaintance with the detective.  Sholmes finds and opens the secret passage in just a few minutes, showing that he is not less smart than Arsene, and in fact he might have caught him, if Arsene had not gotten that one step ahead, by figuring out the secret before Sholmes even arrives.

Overall, it was a great read, and I can highly recommend it, if you read French.  If not, then the English translation should be available.

Book #18

I am catching up on things.  I want to be up to date at the end of June, when I will have to admit that I am not going to make my goal.  So, there will be several more books appearing over the next week.

Arsene Lupin

Maurice LeBlanc

Now, during the Victorian era, everyone knows that Arthur Conan Doyle was writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, and though you may not know it yet, I am a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.  Now, some few out there who know the real me, will know that I speak French.  I spent two years in France, 35 years ago, and later took a minor in French.  So imagine my surprise when I found that while in English, Arthur Conan Doyle was writing about the great detective, Sherlock Holmes, there was, in France an author by the name of Maurice LeBlanc who was writing stories about Arsene Lupin, not a detective, but a great criminal, a gentleman burglar. 

I found that Amazon has a number of Arsene Lupin books, for free on Kindle.  Unfortunately, I cannot find anywhere that discusses the stories and novels and puts them into their proper order, either by publication, or story chronology, so I had to pick one at random, and this was it.

Now, I do not want to give away any spoilers, because the twists are what make this story fun, but Arsene's modus operandi is to send a letter to his victim saying exactly what he is going to steal and when, and then carry out the theft just as described.  In a theft that occurred three years before our story, the man who was robbed, after receiving the letter, actually hired guards, and when the guards arrived...they were men hired by Arsene. 

Also, in this story, Arsene plays a long game, the theft described above, is the same victim who is robbed in the story.  I found the whole thing a lot of fun.

Oh, and this time I read a translation.  The next book I read will be in the original language.