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Arsène Lupin is a famous thief who can disguise himself as anyone. In this book he does something amazing: he pretends to be the head of the police, and uses the job to hunt a murderer, while the real police hunt for him. Nobody knows who he really is, and a mysterious number, 813, hides a secret that powerful people would kill to protect.
Leblanc builds the novel as a duel of disguises. Lupin lives two lives at once: as M. Lenormand he runs the detective force hunting the Palace Hotel murderer, and as Prince Sernine he works the same mystery from the criminal side. The chapters alternate pressure between the two identities, so the reader watches one man investigate himself, planting clues with one hand and discovering them with the other, while the number 813 waits at the center of the plot.
The theme is identity and what it costs to wear a mask. Every character in the book is performing a part, and the secret behind 813 is large enough to bend governments, which makes Lupin's game darker than the playful thefts of the earlier books. Winning, here, may mean losing the people he is trying to protect.
It lasts because it stretches the gentleman thief formula until it nearly breaks. The charm is still there, the disguises, the impossible escapes, but the stakes are tragic rather than comic, and the ending refuses easy comfort. Among the early Lupin novels, this is the one that shows how far the character can be pushed.
Maurice Leblanc published 813 in French and English in 1910, and it is the longest, darkest of the early Arsène Lupin novels. The gentleman thief turns the game inside out: as M. Lenormand, brilliant new chief of the detective force, Lupin directs the hunt for the Palace Hotel murderer, while as Prince Sernine he pursues the same secret from the other side. Everything turns on a number, 813, and a secret bigger than murder.
813 earns its place as the grandest of the early Arsène Lupin novels: the book in which Maurice Leblanc takes his gentleman thief out of the drawing room caper and gives him a plot of genuine darkness and scale. Published in French and English in 1910, in Alexander Teixeira de Mattos's translation, it finds Lupin running the detective force itself, as M. Lenormand, while pursuing the same secret from the criminal side as Prince Sernine. No other Lupin book so thoroughly blurs the line between hunter and hunted.
A reader should expect a long, rich, deliberately intricate novel rather than a string of tricks. The murders at the Palace Hotel are only the door into a mystery organized around a single number, and Leblanc keeps the full shape of it hidden for hundreds of pages while the disguises multiply. The wit and audacity are the familiar Lupin pleasures, but the tone darkens as the stakes rise toward state secrets and real loss. If the shorter Lupin stories are champagne, this is the same house's vintage claret: slower, deeper, and the bottle readers argue about. It is the Lupin to read when you want the legend tested, not just performed.
Edition: Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Text: Standard Ebooks edition.
The first chapter
A zealous reader, collating the translation of this book with the original, would hit upon certain differences. These are due to alterations made, in most case, by the author himself, and, in all cases, with his full approval.
A. T. de M.
Chelsea, England, August, 1910.
Source: Standard Ebooks. French and English editions published 1910. Author died 1941. Translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos died 1921. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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