This early work by Maurice Leblanc was originally published in 1919 and we are now republishing
 it with a brand new introductory biography. In “The Secret of Sarek,” the action takes place
 almost entirely on the fictional Island of Sarek in 1917, in which Leblanc deftly blends 
crime fantasy and science fiction. Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc was born on 11th November 1864 
in Rouen, Normandy, France. He was a novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as
 the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective, Arsène Lupin. From the start, 
Leblanc wrote both short crime stories and longer novels – and his lengthier tomes, heavily
 influenced by writers such as Flaubert and Maupassant, were critically admired, but met with
 little commercial success. Leblanc was largely considered little more than a writer of short
 stories for various French periodicals when the first Arsène Lupin story appeared. It was 
published as a series of stories in the magazine 'Je Sais Trout', starting on 15th July,
 1905. Clearly created at editorial request under the influence of, and in reaction to,
 the wildly successful Sherlock Holmes stories, the roguish and glamorous Lupin was a 
surprise success and Leblanc's fame and fortune beckoned. In total, Leblanc went on 
to write twenty-one Lupin novels or collections of short stories. On this success, 
he later moved to a beautiful country-side retreat in Étreat (in the Haute-Normandie
 region in north-western France), which today is a museum dedicated to the Arsène Lupin
 books. He died in Perpignan (the capital of the Pyrénées-Orientales department in
 southern France) on 6th November 1941, at the age of seventy-six.
*** E-book in epub format ***