

Maurice Leblanc was the second child of Émile Leblanc, 34-year-old ship-owner merchant, and of Mathilde Blanche (née Brohy) daughter of rich dyers, aged 21 and was delivered by Achille Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert's brother. He was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Leblanc was awarded the Légion d'Honneur for his services to literature, and died in Perpignan in 1941. Leblanc also wrote two notable science fiction novels: Les Trois Yeux (1919), in which a scientist makes televisual contact with three-eyed Venusians, and Le Formidable Evènement (1920), in which an earthquake creates a new landmass between England and France.


He continued to pen Lupin tales well into the 1930s. Several times he tried to create other characters, such as private eye Jim Barnett, but he eventually merged them with Lupin. Like Conan Doyle, who often appeared embarrassed or hindered by the success of Sherlock Holmes and seemed to regard his success in the field of crime fiction as a detraction from his more "respectable" literary ambitions, Leblanc also appeared to have resented Lupin's success. Clearly created at editorial request, it is possible that Leblanc had also read Octave Mirbeau's Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique (1901), which features a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, and he had seen Mirbeau's comedy Scrupules (1902), whose main character is a gentleman thief.īy 1907, Leblanc had graduated to writing full-length Lupin novels, and the reviews and sales were so good that Leblanc effectively dedicated the rest of his career to working on the Lupin stories. The first Arsène Lupin story appeared in a series of short stories that was serialized in the magazine Je sais tout, starting in No. Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc ( / l ə ˈ b l ɑː n/ French: 11 December 1864 – 6 November 1941) was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes. Marguerite Wormser (after 1895, married 1906).Montparnasse cemetery (since October 14, 1947)ĭetective fiction, science fiction, psychological novel.Saint-Martin cemetery in Perpignan (NovemOctober 11, 1947).
