Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc (11 November 1864 – 6 November 1941) was a French novelist and short story writer best known as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Sherlock Holmes.  The first Lupin story was commissioned by the magazine Je Sais Tout and was quite a success.  It is likely that Leblanc had read Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique by Octave Mirbeau, which features a gentleman thief, as well as his comedy Scruples, whose main character is also a gentleman thief.  By 1907 he was turning out novels as well as stories that were so successful and lucrative that he dedicated his career to the Lupin series.  Like his counterpart Arthur Conan Doyle, who often expressed embarrassment at the success of Sherlock Holmes, Leblanc had other, more “respectable” literary ambitions and somewhat resented the success of Lupin.  His attempts to develop other characters inevitably resulted in their appearance in the Lupin stories.  He continued to write Lupin stories into the 1930s.  He wrote two notable science fiction novels, Les Trois Yeux (1919) and Le Formidable Evènment (1920). He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur for his literary contributions. Lupin in the inspiration for the main character in the popular Netflix series Lupin that debuted in January 2021.