Lupin’s adventures spawned countless French books, movies and TV series, yet until a few months ago, most people I know had never even heard of him.
Created by British TV writer George Kay, this French series does for the genius Parisian thief what the show Sherlock did for the world’s greatest consulting detective.
Using them as a kind of instruction manual, Assane has grown up to become a criminal virtuoso and a master of disguise who, like Robin Hood or Roger Moore in The Saint, breaks the law but manages to remain on the side of the angels.
These shenanigans involve everyone from a corrupt police bigwig to an embittered investigative reporter to Hubert Pellegrini, a sinister mogul played with scuzzy relish by Hervé Pierre.
Not only has one of Pellegrini’s thugs kidnapped his son, but he’s been tracked down by a cop who’s also a big fan of Arsène Lupin.
The show offers us the pleasure of watching Assane getting out of seemingly inescapable situations by slapping on a phony mustache, doing some mysterious computer trick, or pulling off a ridiculously complicated plan that requires 10 things to go right — which, of course, they all do.
You must either pretend that his race wouldn’t matter at all at Eton and in Her Majesty’s Secret Service — which would be whitewashing — or you have to find a good way of making Bond’s Blackness part of the story.
One reason Assane’s disguises work so well is that, when he dresses up as a janitor or delivery man, the people he’s fooling don’t see him as an individual who matters.
In updating the Lupin saga, Kay grasped that having the hero be Black would actually make the story richer and more of our moment.
And though it wears its politics very lightly, Lupin is shot through with an awareness of race, be it a bigoted store owner trying to ruin the young Assane or an old woman prattling on about the glories of colonialism.
Without making a big point of it, Lupin embraces the irony that, in their love and knowledge of France’s great gentleman thief, these two cultural outsiders are actually more French than the French.