She walks a rope for her supper, tells fortunes by the lines of a hand, and mothers four orphan boys out of a single battered caravan — and she is about to out-think every powerful man hunting a two-hundred-year-old fortune. The Secret Tomb is Maurice Leblanc's 1923 adventure Dorothée, danseuse de corde, an Arsène Lupin mystery with no Lupin in it: the master-thief's creator hands one of his unsolved secrets not to the gentleman-burglar but to Dorothy, a penniless fairground acrobat who solves it by wit and agility instead of force. When her wandering circus brings her to the grounds of the Château de Roborey, Dorothy stumbles on a strange excavation and a plot of robbery and murder — the first thread of a deeper mystery. A legend handed down in four branches of one old family tells of a vast inheritance waiting to be claimed, its token a gold medal struck with the motto In Robore Fortuna. To reach the hidden treasure Dorothy must decipher that motto, outrun the rival heirs closing in on the secret, and survive a cold-blooded adversary who means to have the fortune for himself. Quick, charming, and ingeniously plotted, The Secret Tomb gives the whole apparatus of the detective-adventurer to a woman, and makes her wits the engine of the chase. Behind the cipher and the treasure lies a warmer story — of a found family gathered out of the wreckage of the Great War, and of a girl seeking the home and the name she has half-made already. It is Leblanc at his most inventive, and Dorothy is among the most winning heroines in early mystery fiction. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.
