Criminal stories – a gentleman – no thief

He is the French Pulp pop star: Master thief Arsène Lupin comes from the cheap booklet, he is a elegant sequel figure, inspired by the master detective Sherlock Holmes. Only that lupine is on the other side of morality.

The successful British “beach magazine”, in which Arthur Conan Doyle released the Holmes stories at the end of the 19th century, was the inspiration for the invention of France’s most successful super smoke. Commissioned by the popular science journal “Je Sais Tout” to write a story in the style of that magazine, the writer Maurice Leblanc provided the first short story about the master thief in July 1905: “The arrest of the Arsène Lupin”. The name of his hero quickly became a political issue, since he has a clear reference to the one hated Parisian city councilor named Arsène Lopin represented. However, Lupin has kept his name – since the first appearance in the history of his arrest.

In this story, he stumbles on a passenger ship that is located on the way from France to America and thus frightens the passengers. He escapes his opponent, inspector Justin Ganimard, several times in different cladding, which will later become his trademark – in addition to his courtesy as a gentleman. In the end there is an arrest, although it remains open whether the arrested person is really the Arsène lupine you are looking for or not. A real cliffhanger.

Due to the success of this short story, another 39 short stories, 18 novels and five plays around this always polite dandy followed, which are still very popular in French culture to this day. He lives on in countless novels, children’s books, theater performances, film films as well as comics and mangas. His figure has justified his own genre within the French crime literature: stories of gentleman guest. Most recently, the French Netflix series “Lupin” referred to him without reviving the historical lupine itself. Also in the popular German radio play series “Die ???” is a kind of revenue of lupine, as a secondary figure named Victor Hugenay, a clever art thief that always escapes the police.

Lupine inventor Maurice Leblanc comes from the northern French bourgeoisie. Born in Rouen in 1864 as the son of a shipowner, at the beginning of his writer’s career, he made no secret of his sympathy for the anarchist movement. It was the high phase of illegalism and the “expropriation of the expropriators”, the expropriation or the stealing of the rich and exploiters was considered an adequate form of action. A well -known representative of that direction, Alexandre Marius Jacob, the “worker of the night”, was made in 1905 in Amiens. For a long time it was considered in the lupine reception that Leiflanc was inspired by that master thief, which he competed violently during his lifetime and what is now considered refuted in recent research. In contrast to the classic expropriators of anarchist stripes, which always donated part of the prey to the families of imprisoned or on the movement projects, Arsène Lupin hoard his thief in the chalk cliffs of Étretat on the Norman coast. Even the legendary treasure of the French kings should be in his possession. The story “The Hohle Nadel” written in 1909 tells about it – and still inspires the imagination of many treasure hunters.

The Étretat excursion location, which is very popular with tourists in summer, benefits particularly from this story. Leblanc also lived there in a villa that houses an Arsène Lupine museum these days. Thanks to a kind of Pokemon GO variant, fans can also go on the footsteps of the master thief through the city center. In contrast, in Étretat, the church in which the later Nobel Prize winner André Gide and his wife gave themselves the yes, and the house of the French narrator Guy de Maupassant have lost importance, yes they seem to be irrelevant.

The stories about Arsène Lupin live from a few steadily recurring style elements. A sympathetic and educated antihero comes into fighting with a lot of humor in the fight with an upper class often shown as decadent. He always uses different cladding to get his victims and to deliver a cat-and-mouse game with the police. Both some mysticism and a pinch of romance are interwoven in this stories, which is more reminiscent of adventure and classic detective stories. There is also a lot of Norman local color. In contrast to other famous heroes of French crime literature that work in the sophisticated Paris-be it Fantômas, whose headquarters are located in the Montmartre Parisian, or the Fiat Lux agency of Nestor Burma in the tenth arrondissement-the Lupin stories mostly play around Étretat, Le Havre and Rouen.

The upper class is robbed, the police are overzealous, but at a loss. The motto applies: “You can’t arrest an Arsène Lupine.” He has already proven this several times in countless novels, children’s books, theater performances, filmings, comics and mangas, in which he always escapes both the police and a British master detective named Herlock Sholmes.