813

Blurb

France’s most charming criminal stands accused of murder. In 813, the fourth of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin novels and the most ambitious of them all, the millionaire Rudolf Kesselbach — the King of Diamonds — is found dead in a Paris hotel, and every clue points to Lupin. For once the gentleman-thief is not the author of the crime but its scapegoat, and to clear his name he must do the one thing he has always mocked: become a detective. What follows is a breathless duel on two fronts. On one side stands M. Lenormand, the implacable chief of the French police, determined to take Lupin alive; on the other, a shadowy killer in black who signs his crimes L. M. Both Lupin and his enemy are hunting the same thing — Kesselbach’s secret, a buried truth that could overturn the map of Europe, its key locked inside a cryptogram the dying man reduced to a single number: 813. The trail runs from Parisian salons to a fortress on the German frontier and at last into the presence of a reigning emperor. Fast, theatrical, and dense with disguise and reversal, 813 is the master-criminal story at its most audacious — the thief turned analyst, the accused turned avenger, and a pre-war intrigue that reads, a century on, with uncanny prescience. It remains one of the great entertainments of classic crime fiction. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s origins and its pre-war intrigue, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.