My excuse for duplicating reports that we all heard from the newsboys is that I can supply something new: I can furnish the key to the puzzle. There is always a certain mystery about these adventures: I can dispel it. I reprint articles that have been read over and over again; I copy out old interviews: but all these things I rearrange and classify and put to the exact test of truth. My collaborator in this work is Ars ne Lupin himself, whose kindness to me is inexhaustible. I am also under an occasional obligation to the unspeakable Wilson, the friend and confidant of Holmlock Shears. (For this is the adventure where Ars ne Lupin and Holmlock Shears came face to face. And a thrilling adventure it is.)

Author Biography

Maurice Marie Emile Leblanc (1864 - 1941) was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsene Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes. Leblanc was largely considered little more than a writer of short stories for various French periodicals when the first Arsene Lupin story appeared in a series of short stories serialized in the magazine Je Sais Tout, starting in No. 6, dated 15 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.