It Takes a Crook to Run THE BARNETT & CO. DETECTIVE AGENCY (1928)

Originally posted May 13, 2024.

“I’m asking you not to rob anyone.”
“Even those who deserve it?”

Arsène Lupin, gentleman burglar, might work on the opposite side of the law, but his adventures often sidle along detective story beats, whether that’s the riddle of the Hollow Needle or Lupin matching wits with an unknown serial killer. Occasionally Leblanc dabbled in straightforward mysteries… including ones that were politely stolen. ‘A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues,’ from Confessions, is quite openly just ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ with the framing device of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost Special’. The overall effect is of someone blusteringly recounting the plot of ‘Rue Morgue’ over the phone in the minutes before they have to catch an airplane. It’s not good, basically.

This wouldn’t be the last time that Lupin directly played amateur detective. Leblanc revisited the concept in the stories collected in L’Agence Barnett et Cie. The complication is that detective Jim Barnett (secretly Arsène Lupin) offers free investigative services so that he can rob his clients, a premise I found so delightfully immoral that when I first heard of it, I had to track it down immediately—without luck, since while the book has apparently been published in English as Arsène Lupin Intervenes or Jim Barnett Intervenes, it’s been out of print since 1929. One of the Jim Barnett stories, ‘The Bridge That Broke,’ was reprinted in The Oxford Book of Detective Stories ed. Patricia Craig (which I recommend both as a compilation of otherwise-untranslated deep cuts and an excellent doorstop). The others have remained unavailable to monolingual anglophones who don’t want to drop $500 on a rare first edition, at least until 2014, when a new translation by Josephine Till was published on Kindle.

The quality of the eBook is a little bare-bones, and slipshod in places: no chapter markers, some missing punctuation, and a couple of odd errors like translating “la chronique mondaine” as “social media”. However, it’s readable and inexpensive, so if you’re a Lupin completionist, it’ll serve you just fine. Since I can read passably in French, and the original is in the public domain, I ended up flipping back and forth between the two editions when I didn’t understand a sentence.

Barnett is a sleazy detective who apparently works for the love of the game, assisting beleaguered young police inspector Théodore Béchoux. But unlike The Hollow Needle’s boy detective Isidore Beautrelet, Barnett/Lupin is no goody-two-shoes investigator. He brow-beats his clients with his usual ‘dominating’ attitude, loves to show off, and, if he doesn’t take a fee, always finds some way to get his due. His behaviour increasingly wears on Béchoux’s nerves, from forcing him to collaborate, to seducing his ex-wife, culminating in ‘Béchoux’s Arrestation of Jim Barnett,’ which ends predictably. All that said, justice… of a kind… is typically served. As Béchoux puts it, “Barnett punished the guilty and saved the innocent, but didn’t forget to pay himself.” He is, after all, a gentleman thief.

The mysteries still have some of that breathless quality, where Lupin brilliantly blitzes through clues that were never mentioned to the reader, as with ‘Accidental Miracle,’ an impossible shooting with an interesting setup and an outlandish solution. The tightest was ‘The Fallen Drops,’ which revolves around a strange not-burglary in a noblewoman’s boudoir, which (as with a few of these stories) turns out to be a case of scorned affections and cold revenge. ‘The Twelve Africans of Béchoux’ is a variation on ‘The Purloined Letter’ where Barnett has to find Béchoux’s lost mining shares while the latter refuses his help at all costs, which would make for a decent premise except (as you might guess from the title) there’s a central joke that is a racist play on words. There are some truly incredible levels of 1920s French colonial dynamics bound up in this one. ‘The Bridge That Broke’ is not included here, which is a shame, because it’s easily the best of the Barnett lot.

If anglophones might bemoan Barnett & Co.‘s long unavailability, unusually enough, so can francophone readers. ‘The Bridge That Broke’ was apparently only collected in the English edition of Arsène Lupin Intervenes, and took until 2005 to appear in French.