Maurice LeBlanc (1864-1941) was born to a wealthy business family, but he left behind a secure factory career in order to pursue a career in writing. He struggled for a while, but then in 1905 he received a commission to write a story that was intended to be in the gentleman-thief genre that had recently become popular due to the A. J. Raffles stories of E. W. Hornung (the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). The short story, "The Arrest of Arsène Lupin", was a smashing success, and LeBlanc began turning out several other stories about the gentleman thief, imagining him to be a French version of the very British Raffles, and to be Sherlock Holmes's equal-and-opposite in the thieving world. The latter would eventually get LeBlanc in some legal trouble from the Doyle estate; unperturbed, LeBlanc just started calling the equal-and-opposite of Lupin in the detective world, 'Herlock Sholmes'. Ironically, LeBlanc would soon have the same problems with Arsène Lupin that Doyle had with Sherlock Holmes. The character was difficult to write convincingly and it was impossible to keep up with the demand for new stories; so, like Doyle, LeBlanc would eventually try to kill off his character and yet, like Doyle, find that when a character reaches a certain level of popularity, the author no longer has complete say on whether they stay killed. Nonetheless, LeBlanc seems to have reconciled to this more easily than Doyle, buying a house and calling it "Clos Lupin". He lived his last years as World War II began to ramp up, leaving Clos Lupin out of worries of German invasion, and died of pneumonia in 1941.
I've previously done all the Sherlock Holmes stories for the Fortnightly Book, and I have wanted to do all the Lupin stories as well. I read the first one, I think, a very long time ago, and a few years ago, I listened to several of them on audiobook, and ever since they have been on the list, and I have had the box set of the first ten sitting on my to-do pile, and I have just not gotten around to them. So let's start remedying that; the next Fortnightly Book is Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, the collection of nine short stories that started the character's career.
