Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Gustave Caillebotte, Fernand Léger and Edvard Munch. A gentleman burglar announces the theft in advance, in writing, and takes the thing anyway. Leblanc was a jobbing writer until a magazine asked him for a crime story in 1905; Lupin arrived fully formed — vain, generous, unbeatable — and France preferred him to Holmes, whom Leblanc cheerfully borrowed and had to rename after the lawyers wrote. Sixty plates of Signac and Monet, among others, catch the river light and night water that shadow Lupin's Paris.