Novelist, born in Rouen, NW France. He became known with his crime novels, creating the gentleman burglar Arsène Lupin in 1907. His famous adventures featured in L'Aiguille Creuse (1909) and 20 more successful titles which were later adapted for cinema and television.
Maurice Leblanc Maurice-Marie-Emile Leblanc (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 Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.
Leblanc was largely considered little more than a writer of short stories for various French periodicals when the first Arsène Lupin story appeared in a series of short stories serialized in the magazine Je Sais Tout, starting in No. it is also possible that Leblanc Leblanc had also read Octave Mirbeau's Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique (1901), which features a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, and seen Octave Mirbeau's comedy Scrupules (1902), whose main character is a gentleman thief.
By 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. 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.
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
Leblanc was awarded the Legion d'Honneur for his services to literature, and died in Perpignan in 1941.
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