I'm a little curious about Arsene Lupin since there are two Japanese TV series based on his legacy -- the manga/anime series Lupin the Third (including Hayao Miyazaki's debut feature The Castle of Cagliostro, which I recently got to rewatch on Netflix), which is about Lupin's grandson, and the current Super Sentai series Lupinranger VS Patranger, in which a team of "phantom thief" Rangers and a team of police Rangers battle over the "Lupin Collection" of mystically powered artifacts acquired by Arsene Lupin. Since I'm familiar with those, it might be worth checking out the thing they're both inspired by (although LvP is probably more inspired by Lupin the Third than directly by the Leblanc stories).
I'm aware of
Lupin the Third (I've had to write about it for work, without having ever seen it, which is typical of my work), but not
Lupinranger. I'm actually curious about
Lupin the Third, but the manga is out of print in the US (I believe Tokyopop holds the rights); it's one of those things I just haven't gotten to yet.
I first encountered Lupin in Ellery Queen's anthology
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (which is long overdue for a reprint, and which I hope Titan will tackle as part of their
Further Adventures book line). The anthology reprints the last story in
The Extraordinary Adventures, "Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late," which is the first meeting of Holmes and Lupin. Leblanc plays the encounter very straight; it's not a joke like the battle between Holmes and Raffles in John Kendrick Bangs'
R. Holmes & Co. More recently, a friend posted on Twitter a series of covers from a young adult series of novels about Sherlock Holmes, Arsene Lupin, and Irene Adler as childhood friends (
Sherlock, Lupin & Me), and I was really intrigued by the concept. I enjoyed the first two books, then realized that I didn't really know Lupin except for a long-ago memory.
Fortunately,
Standard Ebooks has free, nicely formatted ebooks of the first five Lupin books. (When I say "nicely formatted," I've paid money for ebooks that are terribly and offensively formatted. These, on the other hand, are very professionally done. Just because they're public domain texts and Standard Ebooks is a volunteer project, that's no reason not to do a professional job.) If you're interested, download
the first book and give it a try. You can't beat free.
I wonder, does the original Lupin have a relentless, obsessive policeman nemesis like his Japanese inheritors do?
Yes, Ganimard of the Paris police. He's not a Lestrade, he's no idiot. He's pretty sharp, and if he has a failing it's that Lupin is
slightly cleverer than he is.
