The Myth of the Gentleman Burglar: Models of Serialization and Temporality in Early Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction

Abstract

In an article entitled ‘Maurice Leblanc et la résurgence de la “série” dans la littérature romanesque française’ (Maurice Leblanc and the resurgence of the ‘series’ in French literature), Aranda argues that in two stories of the cycle devoted to Arsène Lupin’s adventures, ‘La Perle noire’ (1906) (The Black Pearl) and ‘L’Homme à la peau de bique’ (1927) (The Man with the Goat-Skin), Leblanc was the first French writer to adopt a specific serial structure that had apparently disappeared since the Arthurian saga by Chretien de Troyes (Aranda 2003, 114). This strategy involved the use of completely independent episodes, self-contained narratives providing no reference to any temporal continuity between them nor with previous or following parts of the same cycle. As in the case of the 1940s and 1950s classic Superman comics discussed by Eco in the essay ‘The Myth of Superman’ (2004), this type of serialization implies that the characters and their fictional universe remain unaltered after each story, thus allowing the authors to endlessly accumulate new narratives concerning the same subjects. In this type of series, consequently, the concept of chronological time is abolished. While this disjunctive format would become dominant in France in the twentieth century, the more traditional roman-feuilleton, that is an ongoing story serialized in newspapers or magazines, was still the hegemonic model when Lupin’s series debuted. Where then did Leblanc find his inspiration?