Author: Kid Douglas (---.middlebury.edu)
Date: 01-19-2003 17:27
Another place where you see the "thief with a conscience" is in the stories about Arsene Lupin written by Maurice Leblanc in the early 1900s (more info at http://www.sfu.ca/~whw/arsene.html and http://www.lupin.sansei.st/leblanc.html; there are a lot of French-language sites out there, too). Arsene Lupin is a "gentleman thief" who steals more for excitement than anything else and who refuses to shed blood while doing so. Eventually he ends up a part of the police force. Lupin III of the anime world is, according to his creator, the grandson of Arsene Lupin. The movie that I've seen where Lupin III is the closest to Lupin I is _The Castle of Cagliostro_, where the main character is stealing from an evil person, protecting the innocent, etc. The original stories of Arsene Lupin were in French, if you haven't already figured that out, so it's hard to say how much they crossed over to influence the stuff talked about here, but from what I can tell these stories are really well known in France, similar to how Sherlock Holmes is really well known to anglophones.
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