In a Normandy village, an innocent man sits in prison because a magistrate keeps his crime folded inside a pocket watch — and the only way to reach it is to become the man’s doctor and stay long enough to be believed. On the Lyon express, Lupin recognises a forger he was told had died in prison: alive, broken-handed, carrying papers that won’t survive the next police sweep. In a Paris household, an English governess makes three observations about the new secretary — his pen grip, his English, a single expert glance at a painting — and arrives at one conclusion. She tells no one. He leaves exact train fare on her desk, no note, no name, and is gone by Tuesday.

Eleven stories of Belle Époque France, 1903–1908. Lupin returns what was stolen, corrects what was taken by force, and is never caught. The question they keep asking — underneath the forged letters, the switched canvases, the locked rooms that open only for him — is what it costs to be the person who does this. Every disguise is perfect. Every exit is clean. What accumulates is something else entirely.

The disguises are perfect. The question is what they’re hiding from.

The Masks of Arsène Lupin is the first volume in The Lupin Stories — literary short fiction in Belle Époque France.

Also in the series: The Debts of Arsène Lupin and The Rivals of Arsène Lupin.