Arsène Lupin is a fictional gentleman thief and master of disguise created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc. He was originally called Arsène Lopin, until a local politician of the same name protested. The character was first introduced in a series of short stories serialized in the magazine Je sais tout. The first story, “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin”, was published on 15 July 1905.
The character of Arsène Lupin might also have been based by Leblanc on French anarchist Marius Jacob (1879–1954), whose trial made headlines in March 1905, but Leblanc had also read Octave Mirbeau’s Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901), which features a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, and had seen Mirbeau’s comedy Scrupules (1902), whose main character is a gentleman thief.
The extraordinary adventures of Arsène Lupin is the first collection of stories by Maurice Leblanc recounting the adventures of Arsène Lupin, released on 10 June 1907. Containing the first eight stories depicting the character, each was first published in the French magazine Je sais tout following the first on 15 July 1905. The seventh features fictional English detective Sherlock Holmes, changed in subsequent publications to “Herlock Sholmes” after protests from Arthur Conan Doyle’s lawyers, as seen in the second collection Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes.
[each story is a different brochure and can be downloaded from here:]