“Don Luis had never been up in an aeroplane” (Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc before 1905)
Some of the works of Maurice Leblanc are considered in the article, who is one of the creators of the French classic detective, written between 1890 and 1905 (before the publication of the first novel about the adventures of "gentleman-cambrioleur" by Arsène Lupin). The influence of Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Gustave Flaubert is combined with an appeal to Breton legends and erotic motives popular in the “Belle Époque”. The image of a bicycle, a car and the cult of speed associated with them, anticipating the plot dynamics of Lupinian in these works is analysed. On the example of Leblanc's short stories, published in a number of newspapers in the mid-1890s to early 1900s, the gradual maturation of criminal narrative in his work is shown. Among the problems raised in the article – Leblanc's reaction to the ideas of anarchism and the potential influence on the image of Arsène Lupin of the personality of the famous anarchist Marius Jacob as well as the influence of the work of Ernest William Hornung (the creator of the character of A. J. Raffles, the "Amateur Cracksman").