Opening Passage: From "Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!...", the first story in the collection:
"Lupin," I said, "tell me something about yourself."
"Why, what would you have me tell you? Everybody knows my life!" replied Lupin, who lay drowsing on the sofa in my study.
"Nobody knows it!" I protested. "People know from your letters in the newspapers that you were mixed up in this case, that you started that case. But the part which you played in it all, the plain facts of the story, the upshot of the mystery: these are things of which they know nothing." (p. 1)
Summary: The ten stories in this collection are a mixed group, very different from one to another. However, they focus on aspects of Lupin's character that tend to go beyond his mere master-thievery, although we do, of course, get some of that. A significant, and unsurprising one, is Lupin's major strength and weakness, namely, beautiful women. This comes up in "The Wedding-Ring", "The Infernal Trap", and "Edith Swan-Neck". In several, Lupin plays the detective, sometimes to further a theft (as in "The Red Silk Scarf" or "The Invisible Prisoner") and sometimes to prove a point (as in "A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues"). In all of them, things are not precisely what things seem.
A common, although not universal, thread through the stories is the use of this idea, that things are different from what they appear to be, as a sort of joke or topsy-turviness. In the case of "A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues", the central joke is actually a pun, since the story is an homage of sorts to Edgar Allan Poe's classic and genre-defining detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", which it combines with a deliberate subversion of a common expectation in detective fiction, that the solutions to detective fictions stories are not supposed to repeat, and the upside-down insistence by Lupin, inconsistent with the thinking of so many stories in detective fiction, that extraordinary effects require extraordinary causes. Perhaps Lupin is so insistent on the matter because so many of his own effects are out of the ordinary. We get the same sort of subversiveness in Lupin's insistence in "Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!...", found in less bald form in other stories in the book, that those staples of detective fiction, rigorous deduction and close observation, don't actually matter much for solving mysteries; what matters instead is intelligent intuition, the ability to see that a bunch of very different things nonethless fit together if you only make the right supposition. Crime, in reality, is a personal foible; you find the explanation not by method but by a good understanding of people.
I think "Edith Swan-Neck" is structurally the best story in the work; it contains a nice set of twists upon twists. The story is also strengthened by the fact that it does a very good job of showing that Ganimard, Lupin's longsuffering and ever-losing detective opponent, is actually quite brilliant. He may not at the level of Herlock Sholmes or Lupin himself, but he is very, very good at his job. The perpetual danger, of course, is that, fated always to fail in his pursuit of Lupin, he could come across looking like a buffoon or an incompetent, which is to the detriment of Lupin himself. Here, however, as Lupin himself notes, he shows himself to be formidable, and thus to highlight Lupin's own genius all the more. My favorite story in the work, however, is the very charming "The Invisible Prisoner", in which Lupin casually commits a theft by apparently solving the theft he commits.
Favorite Passage: From "Edith Swan-Neck":
"But then why all these complications? Why the theft of one tapestry, followed by its recovery, followed by the theft of the twelve? Why that house-warming? Why that disturbance? Why everything? Your story won't hold water, Ganimard."
"Only because, you, chief, like myself, have stopped halfway; because, strange as this story already sounds, we must go still farther, very much farther, in the direction of the improbable and the astounding. And why not, after all? Remember that we are dealing with Arsène Lupin. With him, is it not always just the improbable and the astounding that we must look for? Must we not always go straight for the maddest suppositions? And, when I say the maddest, I am using the wrong word. On the contrary, the whole thing is wonderfully logical and so simple that a child could understand it. Confederates only betray you. Why employ confederates, when it is so easy and so natural to act for yourself, by yourself, with your own hands and by the means within your own reach?" (p. 231)
Recommendation: Recommended.
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Maurcie Leblanc, The Confessions of Arsène Lupin, Fox Eye (Leicester: 2022).
