Book excerpt: This early work by Maurice Leblanc was originally published in 1907 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. "The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar" is the first collection of stories by Maurice Leblanc recounting the adventures of Arsene Lupin. 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. Maurice Marie Emile Leblanc was born on 11th November 1864 in Rouen, Normandy, France. He was a novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective, Arsene Lupin. From the start, Leblanc wrote both short crime stories and longer novels - and his lengthier tomes, heavily influenced by writers such as Flaubert and Maupassant, were critically admired, but met with little commercial success. Leblanc was largely considered little more than a writer of short stories for various French periodicals when the first Arsene Lupin story appeared. It was published as a series of stories in the magazine 'Je Sais Trout', starting on 15th July, 1905. Clearly created at editorial request under the influence of, and in reaction to, the wildly successful Sherlock Holmes stories, the roguish and glamorous Lupin was a surprise success and Leblanc's fame and fortune beckoned. In total, Leblanc went on to write twenty-one Lupin novels or collections of short stories. On this success, he later moved to a beautiful country-side retreat in Etreat (in the Haute-Normandie region in north-western France), which today is a museum dedicated to the Arsene Lupin books. He died in Perpignan (the capital of the Pyrenees-Orientales department in southern France) on 6th November 1941, at the age of seventy-six."