by Maurice Leblanc
Classic mysteryNo. 1651 hr 11 minArsène Lupin
A warning note slipped into a locked apartment, a metal playing card — the seven of hearts — pierced with seven small holes, and a stranger who breaks in to investigate only to shoot himself before he can speak: so begins one of the strangest cases in the Arsène Lupin canon, as the narrator is drawn into a mystery he never asked for and learns his home was once owned by Louis Lacombe, a vanished inventor who built a weaponised submarine and a hidden vault sealed by a code only those metal cards can unlock; a murdered engineer, stolen war plans, a banker with a secret, and a vault concealed in a mosaic floor — threads no single man should be able to follow, unless that man is Arsène Lupin, gentleman burglar and master of disguise, who has been standing in the room the whole time under another name; this is Maurice Leblanc's great creation, the thief cleverer than the police and always three moves ahead, France's answer to Sherlock Holmes, from The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Maurice Leblanc wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
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