Maurice Leblanc

Lupin Review, Season 1

By Hector DeJean

 February 22, 2021

It’s appropriate that the Netflix series Lupin, a show named after a master of disguise, could be described in many different ways, with few of those descriptions being entirely accurate. Lupin has apparently proved more popular even than the previous Netflix phenomenon The Queen’s Gambit, but it’s also harder to sum up. It’s inspired by…

Mark Twain

Fingerprints 103: Mark Twain’s Prescience and Crime’s Penmen

By Dr. Lewis Preschel

 June 6, 2011

The first American writer to use fingerprints in solving crime was the famous Mark Twain in his perhaps-embellished memoir about life as a steamboat pilot, titled Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. In chapter 31, “A Thumb-print and What Came of It,” he has a character, inspired by an old “French prison-keeper” use a…