Maurice Leblanc
1864–1941 · France
he created a thief who stole his own author's name
Leblanc was the son of a Rouen shipping family, wrote careful literary novels through his thirties, and was read by almost nobody. In 1905 an editor launching a popular magazine asked him for a French answer to Sherlock Holmes. He produced a gentleman burglar in evening dress who robs only the rich, escapes by impersonation and leaves a calling card, and the first story ran that July.
Arsène Lupin took over his life. He wrote him for thirty-five years, across some twenty volumes, and complained more than once that no reader would let him be anything else — the creation had eaten the author's name.
He also picked a quarrel he could not win. Having put Sherlock Holmes into a Lupin story outright, he received an objection from Conan Doyle and rechristened the character Herlock Sholmès, which fooled nobody and was probably not meant to.
His Étretat novel, in which the hollow needle of rock off the Normandy coast turns out to be a hiding place, attached itself so firmly to the real cliffs that visitors still go looking. He died in 1941, decorated, prosperous, and permanently in second place to a thief he invented on commission.