The Hollow Needle: Further Adventures of Arsene Lupin

Leblanc, Maurice, 1864-1941Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.7
Word count
375K words
Chapters
38

Tags

English Originals Mystery and Suspense Suspense ThrillerVengeance and GratitudeGentleman ThiefCunning WitJianghu FeudAdventure SeriesPuzzle Solving

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Hollow Needle; Further adventures of Arsene Lupin by Maurice LeblancAuthor: Leblanc, Maurice, 1864-1941,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: May 1, 2003

Editor's review

As a pivotal full-length novel in Leblanc's Arsène Lupin series, this book interweaves the gentleman-thief narrative with the central mystery of the "hollow needle," offering both the pleasures of locked-room-style deduction and the pacing of a road-chase adventure. Compared with the earlier short-story collections, this novel places greater emphasis on the gradual convergence of clues, and readers will keep revising their judgments as they follow the contest between Lupin and his adversaries. The Project Gutenberg edition preserves the public-domain original text and serves as a good entry point for understanding the tradition of French popular detective fiction. While reading, note how the author uses dialogue to drive the revelation, and how Lupin's "morally ambiguous" image is shaped through concrete actions. For genre-fiction fans, it offers a sample of the transition from linked short stories to a novel structure; for English learners, the sentences are not overly difficult and it can serve as extensive reading material.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read an early short story or two from the series first, then enter this novel; it is easier to understand the characters and narrative conventions.
  2. Keep pen and paper ready to note clues related to the "hollow needle" and shifts in characters' positions, then look back at the foreshadowing after finishing.
  3. If using it for English extensive reading, summarize the plot in two or three sentences after each chapter so as not to chase only the action and miss information in the dialogue.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38

FAQ

Can I read this directly without having read the previous books? Yes. This is a standalone full-length adventure, and the central mystery and main adversaries are gradually explained within the book; however, Arsène Lupin's image is built on series conventions, so reading one or two early short stories first will make it easier to enter the "gentleman-thief versus detective" confrontation.
Is the deduction in this book difficult? It leans more toward a combination of adventure and puzzle-solving than strict honkaku deduction. Clues unfold through chases and dialogue, and readers need not duel with the author in a fair-play manner; it is better suited to enjoying the process of the mystery being revealed and the contest between characters.
What are the features of the Project Gutenberg edition? This edition is a public-domain electronic text that preserves the original English, making it convenient for free reading and searching. It usually contains no modern notes or introduction, so readers must handle older expressions and the historical background on their own; if support is needed, background materials on the French original or a series introduction can be used alongside it.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Leblanc, Maurice, 1864-1941 Author

Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941) was a French writer best known for creating the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Twenty-four of his works are held in this collection, including The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, The Teeth of the Tiger, The Confessions of Arsène Lupin, The Crystal Stopper, The Blonde Lady, and Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes, the last of which is especially familiar to readers. His novels center on investigation, theft, and contests of wit, with intricate plots, brisk pacing, and frequent unexpected twists that blend crime fiction with adventure. Because public information is limited, his early life and full body of work cannot be described in detail; yet through the morally ambiguous figure of Lupin, he brought a distinctive charm to French popular detective fiction and left a lasting influence on later gentleman-thief stories.