LeBlanc Maurice: - Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc was a French author and short story writer who lived from December 11, 1864, to November 6, 1941. He is best known for creating the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, who is often compared to Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. The first Arsène Lupin story was published in the magazine Je sais tout as a set of short stories, beginning with No. 6 on July 15, 1905. Octave Mirbeau's Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique (1901), which has a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, and Mirbeau's comic Scrupules (1902), which also has a gentleman thief as the main character, were also stories that Leblanc may have read or seen. Around 1907, Leblanc started writing full-length Lupin books. The reviews and sales were so good that Leblanc pretty much spent the rest of his career writing Lupin stories. Like Conan Doyle, who often seemed embarrassed or slowed down by Sherlock Holmes's fame and seemed to see Holmes's success in crime fiction as taking away from his more "respectable" literary goals, Leblanc seemed to dislike Lupin's fame.