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Welcome to this month’s selection of newly acquired detective and thriller titles.
There is a plethora of diverse and thrilling titles on offer this month, but the title that caught our eye was The best of Lupin: adventures of Arsène Lupin, gentleman-thief by Maurice Leblanc; a reprint of stories from the first half of the twentieth century.
The huge runaway success of A.C. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and the complexity of the character he created, spawned a whole host of budding detectives from all sorts of backgrounds, all hoping to emulate the success of the master detective.
And this was true of the French novelist Maurice Leblanc, who took a rather unique approach to his central character Arsène Lupin – making him not a detective, but a gentleman thief in a similar vein to E. W. Hornung’s A. J. Raffles character. Coincidentally, E.W. Hornung was the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The approach proved to be successful, with Arsène Lupin the gentleman thief going on to feature in 17 novels and 39 novellas .
The Holmes connections didn’t stop with the intellectual gentleman link or the E.W. Hornung connection. In one story, Lupin is introduced Sherlock Holmes – though for copyright reasons, his name was changed to Herlock Sholmès.
Our other top picks in this month’s selection can be viewed below.
The best of Lupin : adventures of Arsène Lupin, gentleman-thief / Leblanc, Maurice
“A collection of 22 short stories selected from the five collections of short stories about master criminal Arsene Lupin that Maurice Leblanc published in France a century ago. The English translations (some by George Morehead and some by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos) are now in the public domain. With a new introduction by mystery writer Martin Walker.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
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