Book No. 12 of 2021
Like everyone else I binge-watched Lupin on Netflix (do yourself a favor and watch it in French with English subtitles, don’t bother with the English dub) and I had no idea that Arsène Lupin was an actual literary figure—I assumed they’d made up the series for the show. So I got in the (very long) hold line for the first Arsène Lupin book, and only just read it now.
The stories really do read very similarly to the original Sherlock Holmes stories—same episodic nature with a similar narrative framing, same satisfying whodunnit structure, all with an air of gentility and whimsy. It’s very fun to see where they mined names, places, plot points, and twists for the show.
Similar Reads
Like I said, many similarities to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (and amusingly, Sherlock shows up in the last story of this book, where of course Lupin gets the last laugh).