How great literature can change your life

Friday

Like many Netflix viewers, our family has fallen in love with Lupin, an updated version of the famous “gentleman burglar.” France’s answer to Sherlock Holmes but working the other side of the law, Arsene Lupin only steals from those who deserve it or can spare the money. Often he breaks the law to make sure that justice is done.

Like the BBC series Sherlock, Lupin has entered the age of the internet. The central character is not actually Lupin himself but Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese immigrant. The Diops are passionate fans of the Maurice Leblanc novels, and when the elder Diop is framed for a diamond theft by his wealthy employer Pellegrini (who needs the insurance money), he sends a Lupin-type code to his son. He is murdered in prison before Assane is old enough to decipher the code, but when young Diop comes of age, he devotes his life to exposing Pellegrini. Since the millionaire has powerful friends, however, burglary and other Lupin-type tactics are Assane’s only options.

The thrill of the series is watching Assane break the law and get away with it, all without harming anyone truly innocent. (For instance, some of the diamonds he steals at one point are blood diamonds from a lady who doesn’t care.) Those who help him or need his help sometimes find themselves the unexpected possessors of a diamond.

The Sherlock Holmes comparison actually comes up in the stories (although not in the Netflix series). Leblanc wrote a few stories where Lupin outwits Holmes, and when Doyle complained about copyright infringement, he changed the name to Herlock Sholmes (a lack of subtlety not at all worthy of Lupin). I wonder if this was a case of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” where authors, desiring to be original, attack or otherwise disparage those who most influenced them.

We see Doyle himself doing this in the early pages of Study in Scarlet, where Watson first meets Holmes. Holmes has just, after a quick glance, informed Watson of his entire life history and then explained how he did it:

“It is simple enough as you explain it,” I said, smiling. “You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”

“Have you read Gaboriau’s works?” I asked. “Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”

Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. “Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” he said, in an angry voice; “he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”

I felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out into the busy street. “This fellow may be very clever,” I said to myself, “but he is certainly very conceited.”

Harold Bloom would affirm that Holmes does in fact leave his predecessors in the dust since Dupin reads as a pale imitation of Doyle’s detective. Poe may have invented the detective story but Doyle perfected it. Leblanc’s attempt at surpassing his predecessor is less successful, I think. Lupin–perhaps a cross between Dupin and the French word for wolf (loup)–is no Sherlock.

Nevertheless, it’s fun to read—and now watch—a charismatic burglar at work. To give you a quick taste of Dupin at work, here’s the conclusion of “Madame Imbert’s Safe,” a story reminiscent of Doyle’s “Scandal in Beohemia” in that, like Holmes, Lupin finds himself unexpectedly bested by a woman. In his early days before becoming famous, he takes a job with a couple thinking he is the one about to do the robbing. We he discovers their wealth is all counterfeit and that, to boot, the woman has robbed of his meager student savings, he is at first furious and then genuinely amused. The narrator reports,

I could not refrain from laughter, his rage was so grotesque. He was making a mountain out of a molehill. In a moment, he laughed himself, and said:

“Yes, my boy, fifteen hundred francs. You must know that I had not received one sou of my promised salary, and, more than that, she had borrowed from me the sum of fifteen hundred francs. All my youthful savings! And do you know why? To devote the money to charity! I am giving you a straight story. She wanted it for some poor people she was assisting—unknown to her husband. And my hard-earned money was wormed out of me by that silly pretense! Isn’t it amusing, hein? Arsène Lupin done out of fifteen hundred francs by the fair lady from whom he stole four millions in counterfeit bonds! And what a vast amount of time and patience and cunning I expended to achieve that result! It was the first time in my life that I was played for a fool, and I frankly confess that I was fooled that time to the queen’s taste!”

Doyle himself once put Holmes on the wrong side of the law. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” he and Watson break into a blackmailer’s home to retrieve correspondence that would compromise a client. Watson has convinced Holmes to let him come, leading Holmes to reply,

Well, well, my dear fellow, be it so. We have shared this same room for some years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell. You know, Watson, I don’t mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction.

As with Lupin, we get a good chuckle when Holmes plays with the police, who have received a report of them:

“Criminals?” said Holmes. “Plural?”

“Yes, there were two of them. They were as nearly as possible captured red-handed. We have their footmarks, we have their description, it’s ten to one that we trace them. The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the under-gardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes.”

“That’s rather vague,” said Sherlock Holmes. “My, it might be a description of Watson!”

“It’s true,” said the inspector, with amusement. “It might be a description of Watson.”

Needless to say, Holmes refuses to help, and his rationale pretty much sums up Netflix’s Lupin:

I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. No, it’s no use arguing. I have made up my mind. My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will not handle this case.”