Barnett & Co.

The half of Arsène Lupin that English readers have never seen.

In 1928, Maurice Leblanc invented his most daring disguise yet: Jim Barnett, a shabby private detective who charges nothing and asks for nothing. A detective who hands the police their culprit on a plate-and leaves the premises richer than he arrived. Inspector Béchoux spends the entire book knowing exactly what is happening and being unable to prove a single word of it.

Eight self-contained cases. One recurring joke that never stops working:

• A pearl necklace hidden inside a drainpipe-and a dying banker's revenge.
• A murdered bookseller, a missing royal love letter, and an alibi painted on canvas.
• A deadly baccarat game in Rouen where luck itself is the murder weapon.
• A village priest's stolen treasure, two gold teeth, and a mirror trick.
• The impossible theft of an entire bedroom: bed, furniture, curtains and all.
• A political scandal, a fortune-teller, and a constable's white baton that holds the truth.

Why you've never read this one.
For thirty-four years Leblanc wrote Lupin-from 1905 to 1939. The early novels have been translated again and again. What came afterwards-the books he wrote in his sixties and seventies, once he stopped explaining Lupin and started playing games with him-has never had a proper English edition. Until now.

Translated in a single voice for the first time. Sofia E. V. Hamett renders Leblanc's late period in the natural English of a modern thriller: faithful to the plot, the characters and the events, but written to feel alive to a reader today. Nothing abridged. No footnotes. Just pleasure.

Volume 1 of Arsène Lupin: The Forgotten Novels-the sequence that continues through Jean d'Enneris, Raoul d'Avenac and beyond. Almost nobody, in English, knows how Lupin ends. This is where finding out begins.

For readers of Agatha Christie, E. W. Hornung's Raffles, and anyone who came to Lupin through the hit French series.

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