Customer Reviews

Arsene Lupin in The Eight Strokes of the Clock

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It is quite surprising that Arsene Lupin is not largely available in the US... considering quite a lot of French literature had been translated into English... And you are missing out if you do not start reading Lupin!

Anyhow... I think it is fair to compare Arsene Lupin to Sherlock Holmes... However, Arsene Lupin has a much more dynamic personality and an attractive persona that greatly enhance his image as a smart yet eccentrically likable "gentleman burglar." Yes, he still employs logic and daring assumptions to solve all the mysteries, but he does it with style (or poshness).

The translation for this series is quite good. The language itself does not seem like it has been abridged in anyway. You will be amazed by how much you will love the story!

This particular adventure of Arsene Lupin's consists of eight mystery cases which are cleverly interconnected to each other as Arsene solves them one by one, with his love interest as his companion on the side (and she even becomes the target of a crime in one case). All the cases present very different scenarios and require Lupin's clever solutions to unlock the truth to the mysteries.

Simply a page turner.

Though Lupin begins his career as a thief (a gentleman thief) and not as vicious, violent criminal as Fantomas, at some point in his literary life he becomes a force for good, and provides police with valuable help to solve crimes and mysteries.
The reader will remember that after the death of Lupin's girlfriend in the Hollow Needle, Lupin disappears and we learn from 813 that in those three years in which he had been invisible he was actually working in the police force. Finally uncovered, Lupin provided the police with valuable help to solve the crimes/mysteries narrated in 813, then Lupin disappears, joins the Foreign Legion, returns to France in the teeth of the tiger and once again helps the police to solve a long chain of murders and other assorted crimes.
Nowhere, Lupin's detective talents are as visible as in the 8 strokes of the clock--which Ellery Queen regarded as one of the 125 most important collections of short detective stories.
In this book, after coming to the rescue of young lady, he invites her to follow him in his adventures. Some inventions and solutions provided by Leblanc are absolutely pure genius and it is a pity that half of the Lupin catalogue (including the countess of cagliostro and so on) are not available in English translation.
But English-speaking Lupin-readers will be satisfied by these stories.