Maurice Leblanc

#1425: “The only pleasure that never flags is that of the fight itself.” – The Eight Strokes of the Clock [ss] (1922) by Maurice Leblanc [trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos 1922]

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I recently acquired a boxset of 8 Maurice Leblanc novels and short story collections featuring his gentleman bastard Arsène Lupin, and so before I dig into those I thought I should revisit the first Leblanc book I read, the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone collection The Eight Strokes of the Clock [ss] (1922).

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#337: Foreign Bodies [ss] (2017) ed. Martin Edwards

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Had you asserted back in 2014 that the republication of two forgotten crime novels would lay the foundation for one of the most celebrated series of GAD reissues in modern times, well, people would have laughed.  And yet the British Library Crime Classics collection, under the stewardship of Martin Edwards and Rob Davies, is now over 50 books deep and gathering momentum for another exciting year.  And it’s a sure sign of the hale condition of the series that, far from simply reissuing books, they’re now branching out into original translations with this collection of overseas tales.  In the words of Ira Gershwin, who’s got the last laugh now?

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