Best 1909 Adventures (2)
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March 2, 2019
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1909 adventure novels. Happy 110th anniversary!
Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin crime adventure L’Aiguille creuse (The Hollow Needle).
The early Arsène Lupin stories are, in a sense, Sherlock Holmes fanfic. Not only was Leblanc writing in response to Arthur Conan Doyle’s wildly popular detective stories (the twist being that his antiheroic protagonist is a Moriarty-like figure), but in the first Lupin collection, 1907’s Arsène Lupin, gentleman cambrioleur, Lupin outwits a supposedly brilliant British detective, “Herlock Sholmès.” Sholmès is also Lupin’s foil in the second Lupin story collection. Here, in the first full-length Lupin novel, Sholmès and Detective-Inspector Guerchard, Lupin’s French nemesis, seek the gentleman burglar in vain, after Lupin steals the Coronet of Princess de Lamballe from M. Gournay-Martin, a millionaire to whom Lupin had previously sent a note threatening to do exactly that. L’Aiguille creuse was originally written as a play, which is why the first half of the book is set in Gournay-Martin’s mansion; it’s a rather dialog-heavy novel, which doesn’t turn thrilling until the halfway point. The surprise hero of this hunted-man story is teenager Isidore Beautrelet, an amateur detective who succeeds in tracking down Lupin. The intrigue is complex, Lupin wears a number of disguises, there’s a fabulous French treasure angle involving L’Homme au Masque de Fer, and a cryptographic clue. Lupin falls in love and fakes his own death, to get out of the crime business. Will Beautrelet, Guerchard, and Sholmès let him get away with it?
Fun facts: L’Aiguille creuse was serialized in the magazine Je sais tout from 1908–1909; the first Arsène Lupin story appeared in the same magazine in 1905. A modified version of L’Aiguille creuse was published, in book form, in 1909. Luc Sante suggests that Alexandre Jacob (1879-1954), a French “illegalist” anarchist, was a real-life model for Lupin.
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES (in progress) | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | NOTES ON 21st-CENTURY ADVENTURES.