Opening Passage:
Raymonde listened. The noise was repeated twice over, clearly enough to be distinguished from the medley of vague sounds that formed the great silence of the night and yet too faintly to enable her to tell whether it was near or far, within the walls of the big country-house, or outside, among the murky recesses of the park. (p. 1)
Summary: An accidentally foiled burglary and a murder! And seventeen-year-old Isidore Beautrelet finds himself in the neighborhood and cannot help but poke around to see if he can discover something the gendarmes cannot. The trail becomes even more exciting when Beautrelet discovers the involvement of Arsene Lupin, the greatest thief in France and perhaps the world. But from that point, he is in a chess match with a far more experienced foe, and clever and dogged as he may be, it will take turns he cannot possibly expect.
In a sense, just as the previous book opposed Lupin with a loose version of the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, and tried to follow the logic of that, this book does the same, but with an even looser version of Joseph Rouletabille. Rouletabille is the detective in Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room and its sequels, who, when we first meet him, is eighteen years old. If you rearrange the word 'Rouletabille' (which means in English something like 'globetrotter'), you get pretty close to 'Beautrelet', although not exactly, and Beautrelet has a few features that are like Rouletabille. There are important differences -- Beautrelet knows, and has a good a relationship with his father, rather than being an orphan like Rouletabille, and I think it's fair to say that Beautrelet is the more charming character. Nonetheless, Beautrelet is dealing with a similar kind of case in a similar kind of way, involving the same sorts of secret identities.
An obvious problem with this sort of set-up is that you have a school boy, still in high school, going up against Arsene Lupin, and his success needs to be explained. LeBlanc handles this by handicapping Lupin in several ways. First, Lupin is constrained in terms of where and when he can be places by his primary interest, which in this case is romantic. Second, Lupin's own ego tends to lead him to make comments and leave clues that show how clever he is, with the result that, no matter how much Lupin outmatches him, a clever person who is as resolute and curious as Beautrelet is again and again never starting very far behind. And third, Lupin's situation is complicated in that Beautrelet is not his only worry; he is being chased from the one side by his old French foe, Ganimard, and from the other by an immensely more dangerous opponent, Herlock Sholmes, who has less information to work upon but is extremely motivated to hunt Lupin down. The three together will eventually prove too much for Lupin; he will win, and in winning he will lose. Some problems cannot be solved even by the greatest thief who has ever lived.
The Hollow Needle of the title is a reference to a lost treasure associated with the Kings of France, which Lupin and Beautrelet are both seeking. This is a kind of story with which we are very familiar -- things like the Nicholas Cage movie, National Treasure -- in which we have a treasure hunt with a bit of patriotic romance to it. It was, of course, a much less common story in the first decade of the twentieth century. This is, I think, a little weaker than the rest of the story, but it provides the puzzles that move it forward, many of which are themselves quite interesting. (It also, however, makes the story somewhat difficult to summarize without spoiling all the twists and turns.) But part of this is that, interesting as the treasure might be to Beautrelet, Lupin's own interest is in an entirely more precious kind of treasure.
Favorite Passage:
"What fine copies!" said Beautrelet, approvingly.
Lupin looked at him with an air of stupefaction:
"What! Copies! You must be mad! The copies are in Madrid, my dear fellow, in Florence, Venice, Munich, Amsterdam."
"Then these --"
"Are the original pictures, my lad, patiently collected in all the museums of Europe, where I have replaced them, like an honest man, with first-rate copies." (p. 210)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
***
Maurice LeBlanc, The Hollow Needle, Fox Eye Publishing (Leicester, UK: 2022).
