Arsene Lupin in The Eight Strokes of the Clock

Continuing my review of most of the books in the Arsene Lupin series, I've come to the 11th, "Arsene Lupin in The Eight Strokes of the Clock." As one reviewer pointed out, this book was written after Lupin's adventures in The Hollow Needle and 813, and under the guise of Don Luis Perenna in The Golden Triangle, The Secret of Sarek, and The Teeth of The Tiger. Personally I thought the Don Luis Perenna trilogy were some of the weakest in the series (Although the Teeth of the Tiger was much better than the first two) but LeBlanc REALLY rebounded back well with The Eight Strokes of The Clock.In this book, Lupin (Or is it? LeBlanc makes it ambiguous in an author's note in the novel) under the disguse of Prince Serge Renine is out to win over the heart of one Hortense Daniel, who he takes along in eight different adventures as Lupin plays detective those in love and in dire situations of murder and intrigue out. A very Victorian romantic novel and very upbeat compared to many of the other Lupin stories, but Lupin still has that great wit and charm to him, the qualities that make him such a likeable character are really highlighted here, and overall it's just a great book.

The back of the book declares that Maurice LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin is the French equivalent of Sherlock Holmes. Well, maybe. Having read some of his works in French, I was disappointed in this translation. That alone might account for the lackluster presentation and my ambivalence to this book.In creating Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Conan Doyle created characters that were so believable, some people thought they had actually lived! Arsene Lupin simply does not rise to that level in this book. Some of the solutions in this story are incredible. I cannot explain more without providing spoilers. Other stories were as satisfying as any in the Holmes canon. But where Holmes and Watson have a moral center to their work, Lupin is less scrupulous. Well, he started as a "gentleman thief," but that alone makes his stories less satisfying. The end result are some stories in which the reader cannot help but feel a little cheated when murderers go free.Because some of the eight stories are better than others, this is not an bad book. But neither is it a good one, and certainly not a great one. It's not a long book, and it can be read quickly.And if you read it, you can just skip the boring parts.

This is one of Maurice Leblanc’s series of light-hearted detective novels featuring an avatar of Arsene Lupin, “the French Sherlock Holmes”. “Les Huit Coups de l’Horloge” had rested on my night stand for months. I intended to read this classic in French to bolster my faltering fluency, but though I started several times, I was uncertain whether I was really “getting it”, and since it was a detective story, I was afraid I was missing clues. Then I hit on a happy solution: I found an English language version of the same book published by the Wildside Press, and alternated reading the French version and the English version, chapter by chapter.To my delight, I found that my French was better than I had feared; I was in fact, getting the gist of the story. To my perplexity, I found that this English language version often differed from the French, for reasons which were sometimes hard to discern.In one instance English prudery has something to do with it. The leading lady, Hortense Daniel, is married to a lunatic confined to a mental hospital. The mysterious Prince Renine (Arsene Lupin incognito) challenges her to accompany him on eight adventures, promising to cure her boredom. If he succeeds in all eight, including the return of a brooch Hortense lost years ago, it is implied that she will enter into a sexual liaison with him. In the French version, this is an accepted happy ending. In the English version, the husband conveniently dies half-way through the book, so that there is at least a possibility of a legally sanctioned relationship.In other cases the changes seem arbitrary. In “Le Cas de Jean Louis”, Renine saves a young woman who has tried to kill herself by jumping into the Seine, distraught because her fiancé, Jean Louis, has broken their engagement. Her father begs Renine to help her find the fiancé so that she will not attempt suicide again.. In “The Case of Jean Louis” the young woman is not suicidal, but very unhappy because her lover has disappeared and her father is forcing her to marry a man she hates unless he reappears. Renine gets involved because the young lady is a good friend of Hortense. Why the change? Why make the father into a villain? The girl is quite vapid, so we think less of Hortense for having made her a friend.The Wildside Press version published in 2003 gives no name to the translator, so there is no way to inquire why certain characters are omitted, chapters are arranged in a different order, and different reasons are given for events. It’s a mystery.

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.