There’s something very cinematic about the first two and a half minutes of Lupin, Netflix’s breakout French language hit. The montage of workers going in through the back entrance of the Louvre in Paris, having their bags scanned, before hanging out by their lockers and changing into their overalls, is soundtracked by twinkling music that builds up tension. Is this the start of a snappy heist sequence, in the manner of Ocean’s Eleven or Baby Driver? Or are they really cleaners, arriving for an ordinary night shift? The viewer is itching to know, as we watch lead actor Omar Sy pacing the huge parquet floors of the empty opulent galleries with his cleaning cart and broom. He does really seem to be sweeping, but he also lingers for a little too long in front of a glass case containing a diamond necklace. By the time the opening credits sequence crashes on to the screen, we’re already hooked.
The first five episodes of Lupin arrived on Netflix in January 2021 and became an unlikely pandemic hit. Seventy-six million households worldwide reportedly watched it in its first month – a debut second only to that of Bridgerton and the global record for a non-English language series at the time. The show also became the first French series to rank in the top ten on the streaming platform in the United States – a rare feat when the American television market is still so resistant to shows that are dubbed or use subtitles. The critics raved about it, praising Sy’s charismatic performance as master thief Assane Diop, along with the taut, suspenseful script. “If it was a film, it would be a contender for the year’s best – it is that good an experience,” wrote Jonathan Roberts, praising how the show plays with our presumptions. Assane is a skilled criminal. He is also an immigrant from Senegal who faces bias but has learned how to play this to his advantage.
The aspect of Lupin’s success that interested me most, though, was not its viewing figures or the fact that it seemed to have convinced a lot of subtitle-sceptics that watching TV in other languages was not that bad after all. It was the fact that the book that inspired the series became a French bestseller, 114 years after its first publication. Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, a collection of short stories by Maurice Leblanc, first published together in 1907, knocked J. K. Rowling off the top of the children’s chart. It vanished off the shelves in other countries too, selling as many copies in the first 15 days after the show debuted as it had in the previous year.
This isn’t a unique effect – popular TV series often send fans hunting through bookshops for the original text adapted for the screen. Except Lupin isn’t an adaptation of Leblanc’s stories. Omar Sy’s character in the TV show is the child of a Senegalese chauffeur who immigrated to France as a child. He bears no real resemblance to the gentleman thief of the source material, who prowls the streets of early 20th century Paris, robbing the rich of their jewels but never stooping to use violence like a common criminal. When the original character was put on the stage in a 1908 play, the actor André Brulé took on the role of Lupin and turned him into a suave, top-hatted, cane-carrying denizen of the upper classes. This is the image that has lingered in popular culture, even though Leblanc’s text contains little description indicating these characteristics.
Cleverly, in Lupin, the central character of Assane is in dialogue with this famous archetype of “Arsène Lupin”. Assane’s father had gifted his son a copy of the gentleman thief’s adventures before he died in prison, having been framed for a jewel robbery from a powerful family. In the opening episode of the series, Assane passes this same book onto his own son, before setting out on a revenge plot that sees him take on the alias of “Paul Sernine” – an anagram of “Arsène Lupin”.
A police detective notices the similarities between some of Sernine’s antics and the Leblanc stories, thus setting up a literary-tinged rivalry that twists and develops throughout the series.
The character of Arsène Lupin, like his near-contemporary Sherlock Holmes, has appeared in dozens of stories, novels, comics, plays, TV and film versions, many of which were not created by Leblanc. Arthur Conan Doyle, incidentally, objected so strongly to his character’s inclusion in an early Lupin story that Leblanc had to change the name to “Herlock Sholmes” in subsequent reprinting, which is arguably much funnier than just using the original.
Lupin has been a familiar sight on film and TV screens throughout the 20th century, but largely in France and Japan. Lupin III, centred on the original gentleman thief’s grandson, is a Japanese media franchise, beginning in 1967 and spawning numerous manga (Japanese comics or graphic novels), seven animated television series, 13 films, two musicals and several video games. It is popular to this day, although its creator, Kazuhiko Katō, better known by his manga alias “Monkey Punch”, died in 2019.
Such huge popularity has largely eluded the character until now in the US and UK. But there’s a reason why Leblanc’s stories translate so well onto the screen, like those of Conan Doyle. These tales were originally written for serialisation in magazines, meaning that the author had to naturally break their story down into “episodes” with a cliffhanger at the end of each. Charles Dickens, too, was mostly published in this way, and when screen adaptations have followed his original structure – as in the highly praised 2005 BBC version of Bleak House with its 30-minute episodes – the viewer can feel the compelling effect of the pacing.
Television, in recent years, has tended towards recycling and re-adaptation. The biggest hits of the so-called age of prestige TV, like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, have ended up with expensive spin-offs as studios try to squeeze more certain winners from the same tube. Even some more recent critical hits like Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters are actually remakes (that particular show is an English-language version for Apple TV+ of a Flemish series called Clan).
What Lupin proves, I hope, is that there is plenty of popular yet underexploited source material from the golden age of serialised fiction available. Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, for instance. This 1910 collection of short stories by Scarlet Pimpernel creator Baroness Orczy has a brilliant female detective making her way in the male-dominated world of late Victorian criminals and police. It’s ripe for adaptation for a modern audience.
Or the Max Carrados stories by Ernest Bramah, about the adventures of a blind detective in Edwardian London. Bramah was so popular in his time that when his stories appeared in the Strand magazine he was sometimes billed above Conan Doyle. Around the same time, writers like Geraldine Bonner, Anna Katharine Green, Catherine Louisa Pirkis and many others were serialising stories about witty, crime-solving detective characters – all of whom feel ready to step off the page and onto the screen. They are so long out of copyright that they would no doubt prove relatively inexpensive to adapt.
Lupin was so successful that it took its own streaming service by surprise. Rather than an anomaly, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the series became the arbiter of a new trend? The sleuthing heroes of the early 20th century periodical could be fashioned anew for the screens of the 21st. All that’s needed is an innovative approach.
This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
