Word: lupin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...good old ignorant days of Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin, the thriller was a mild, usually non-murderous affair in which there was nothing more bestial than a hound with phosphorescent jowls. Today, when "emancipation is complete [and] Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs," the pulp thriller is "a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age . . . a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombings of civilians . . . torture to obtain confessions . . . execution without trial . . . drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics . . . bribery and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable...
Died. Maurice Leblanc, 76, "the French Conan Doyle"; in Perpignan, France. Unsuccessful poet and so-so novelist, brother of Maeterlinck's friend Georgette Leblanc (TIME, Nov. 3), in 1906 he created Arsene Lupin, "Robin Hood of the drawing rooms," saw his whodunits translated into 25 languages. Working with lead pencil in an all-glass room, he confessed himself mystified by the inspiration for his plots...