Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, a Paris thief who runs his whole life off one birthday present: his father's copy of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. Maurice Leblanc launched Lupin in the magazine Je sais tout in 1905, and the show sent his books back up the French charts more than a century later. The cops chasing Assane would solve everything faster with a library card. One of them has figured that out.
Drop a frame, get a number. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Seen something in S1 E3? Drop the frame The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Leblanc's first Lupin story collection appeared in 1907, which makes it an old playbook for a very modern heist. In 1995, Anne Pellegrini apologizes for her husband's coldness and lets Babakar take any book from the family library for Assane's 14th birthday. He picks Lupin. She offered an apology, and Babakar's choice became Assane's career plan.
The day after the heist, Assane arrives early to see Claire and Raoul, which startles them both, Raoul most of all. He takes his son out onto a bridge, they talk books, and he hands over the copy of Arsène Lupin that Babakar once gave him. Other fathers pass down a watch. Assane passes down the reading list.
Right after the loan sharks are arrested, Youssef Guédira phones Captain Laugier to say the Louvre burglary sounds like a Lupin story. He would know, since he has read all the books and keeps copies at his desk, where other officers sometimes mock him for it. In a building full of case files, he is the one citing a paperback.
Detective Youssef Guédira has papered a wall with Maurice Leblanc covers, from the Je sais tout magazine where Lupin debuted in 1905 to the gentleman thief squaring off with a lightly renamed Sherlock. In this episode he spots that Paul Sernine and Luis Perenna are both anagrams of Arsène Lupin, and his lieutenant tells him to focus on the case. Every other cop in the building is working the robbery. Guédira is the only one doing the assigned reading, which is why he is the only one on the right track.
The episode cuts between three generations of the same family and two Leblanc books. Assane pulls The Confessions of Arsène Lupin off Étienne Comet's shelf and reads it in his own cell, while the edit jumps back to Babakar marking the same paperback with coffee and a cotton swab until the stained words spell out I am innocent, trapped by Anne Pellegrini. Meanwhile Raoul ignores his dinner for Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief, the book Babakar gave Assane and Assane gave him. Babakar was the one who corrected his son's spelling, so the misspellings in his old letter were deliberate, and they're what sent Assane to Comet. His last message is written entirely in Maurice Leblanc's words, which is one way to make sure nobody edits it.
