Arsene Lupin

At one point Amazon suggested the book Arsene Lupin to me.   Being free for Kindle I gave it a try. Turns out there's a whole series of Lupin books (over 20) written by Maurice Leblanc in the early 1900's.

Lupin is a thief.  He often contacts his victims ahead of his crime giving the exact timing of his robbery unless they would be so kind as to send him the desired treasure on their own.  He's a master of disguise, often appearing as several characters in the same book (most notably serving as a police detective for several years).  His strict code of honor means he never kills and often helps the police solve other crimes through ads in a newspaper.  Of course, he has a weakness which is women who often prove his downfall.  I've read five of the books so far and they are fun adventure stories.

One of the interesting things about the Lupin books is that they were written when it copyright law was a little more flexible (or at least creative artists had an easier time stealing from each other).  Thus we have Lupin coming up against Sherlock Holmes in several stories.  Conan Doyle objected so the name was changed to Herlock Sholmes and his assistant Wilson.  You couldn't get away with that today.  The two characters usually fight to a draw although Lupin naturally wins if there is a victor.  Wilson is written as a complete idiot which is quite funny.

I decided to explore some of the free book sites looking for the series.  Between Amazon, Many Books, and Project Gutenberg I've been able to get about half the books for free.  Internet Archive and Open Library turned out to be a complete waste of time since books I downloaded from them were almost illegible.  You get what you pay for so I am somewhat accepting of typos and odd formatting in free Kindle books.  However some free books have missing blocks of text (one stopped mid-sentence and then started a completely new paragraph) or have random lines inserted into the text.  One ebook had the title inserted inserted every few lines, often in the middle of a sentence, which completely destroyed the flow of the text.  Since many free books have other versions available for cheap on Amazon, sometimes you are better off paying.