
The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much (2013) - ableal
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/gerard-de-villiers-the-spy-novelist-who-knows-too-much.html
======
joshmaker
> Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their
> work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo...

This seems like an unfair characterization of Carré who actually worked as a
spy for both MI5 and MI6 and who introduced the word 'mole' as slang for a
sleeper agent into the english language.

~~~
Borogravia
You're not kidding - calling le Carre a "pop novelist" to begin with, let
alone lumping him in with a hack like Tom Clancy, is selling him desperately
short.

~~~
provost
> lumping him in with a hack like Tom Clancy

While not all of his 17 best sellers merited their sales, I'd say a handful of
them were good enough to set Clancy a far cry away from a 'hack'.

~~~
DanBC
Did Tom Clancy write each of those books? It'd be interesting to see if he's
less hacky if we ignore the ghost-written books.

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officemonkey
After this article, my wife visited Paris and went to the FNAC (department
store) to pick up one of these books for me. She asked the clerk and he said
"Oh, we don't have those books here, you should go to the "Tabac" (a hole in
the wall store where you buy newspapers, cigarettes, bus tickets, and junk
food.)

It's funny that the French public puts this guy about two steps below Jack
Reacher and Dirk Pitt. The covers always feature a overly made-up, blonde,
Eastern European in some sort of fancy underwear/fetishwear holding some kind
of fancy gun.

Anyhow, I got my SAS novel and enjoyed it.

~~~
mercurial
Well, it's pretty trashy. The fact that the books are well-documented doesn't
make up for the lack of writing ability (also, I think every book has the same
sex scenes, more or less). They're part of a genre called "roman de gare"
("train station books"): pulp books only fit for reading in the train (and
presumably discarding once read).

~~~
reacweb
There is no lack of writing ability. The writing ability has almost no
correlation with the genre. SAS is not badly written. Even in the worst
collections (like
[http://www.harlequin.fr/collections](http://www.harlequin.fr/collections)),
you can find books that have been written by students who became famous
authors.

~~~
andreasvc
Then what does set them apart from novels with better reputations, if not
style? I don't think it can be just the topic, and I don't believe it's just
some arbitrary value that society assigns to what is high vs. low brow.

~~~
lmm
It is arbitrary. Compare e.g. treatment of Jane Austen (or heck, Shakespeare)
at the time and today.

Academic literature forms a clique (I mean this descriptively rather than
pejoratively). The critics and the writers all know each other, are largely
the same people.

~~~
mercurial
Well, compare Le Carré's writing and De Villiers. Or if you want to compare
two right-wing French writers, take Vladimir Volkoff and De Villiers. Volkoff
forgot more about writing than De Villiers ever knew.

------
SCAQTony
Here is an English translation of his first book, "The turkish Affair" and it
is a free e-book.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=dy0NAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA171&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=dy0NAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=the+turkish+affair+villiers&source=bl&ots=cCmNkexkJw&sig=jhi4EylJbuBqZeU5nVVKWpV4pHw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAWoVChMIt5O8_tnexgIVzwuSCh3CQQD2#v=onepage&q=the%20turkish%20affair%20villiers&f=false)

~~~
ableal
Fencepost error, you're off by one century (and one first name) ...

P.S.

A cursory search hooked me up with this most scrumptious page of Spectator
archives, featuring OCR text and zoomable images of the original pages for a
June 1853 issue: [http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/25th-
june-1853/1/the-...](http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/25th-
june-1853/1/the-turkish-affair-has-taken-a-turn-which-rather-p)

Besides the arch deriding of a Russian _' "circular note," which professes to
be condescendingly frank, is equivocatingly dishonest, and cannot help being
arrogantly insolent'_ , on the image of page 2 there's a concise report on a
House of Lord's debate on the introduction of an income tax, expected to be
abolished in 1860 ...

~~~
SCAQTony
I blew that, my apologies.

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anigbrowl
Died later that year :-/
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/europe/gerard-de-
vil...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/europe/gerard-de-
villiers-83-french-spy-writer-dies.html)

~~~
ableal
The byline in that obituary is the same, Robert F. Worth, but it does have
some other details on Villier's life.

------
andyjohnson0
Previous discussion (5 comments) on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8912397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8912397)

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crdb
After reading the original article when it was first posted, I picked up a few
across the entire range (they're available for a few euros in French on
Kindle) including all of 1-27 and read through them to see what the fuss is
about.

My opinion FWIW:

\- the early books (1-20 or so) are pretty good and similar in tone and
observations to non-fiction of the period written by those who lived it (Mike
Hoare, Mike Calvert... even Jacques Foccart). There's a lot of interesting
claims, which seem ridiculous and with a bit of research appear to be grounded
in some form of reality. Even the names that come up seem to have done what is
claimed that they have done (e.g. Gehlen). The local flavour is fantastic, the
Iron Curtain stuff even more fascinating from being gone today. The books are
extraordinarily politically incorrect in every way you care to list, racism,
sexism, colonialism, great admiration for aristocracy and classism... there is
no way a modern editor will ever approve a translation, or a translator will
ever put their name on the job. Despite the tone, they are the most
interesting ones in terms of actual content. Some are creative - the Hollywood
plot definitely is the result of an active imagination.

\- The middle books (e.g. "Panique au Zaire") get pretty trashy in a Roger
Moore Bond kind of way (but one with the sex scenes left in). There's still
some "local colour" (e.g. in aforementioned, an exploration of Lebanese
networks in Africa) but it's buried under fairly boring and flat plots. At
some point I started skipping most and picking a few titles in locations of
interest. For example, the photos of De Villiers with Savimbi hint that he
might have interesting things to say about Angola, and I read the one on
Singapore because I live there. Oddly enough he becomes more politically
correct, especially regarding racism and colonialism, almost a 180 degree
turn; "Compte a Rebours en Rhodesie" is profoundly anti-Rhodesian and anti-
apartheid and has the aristocratic, blond-haired, "golden-eyed" S.A.S. go help
one of the Rhodesian resistance movements whilst continuously expressing
disgust towards the white Rhodesians. The books are somewhat worth reading for
snapshots into fast moving political situations that look nothing today like
they did back when the book was written.

\- The last books claim a lot of things which seem possible but which we will
never know about. E.g. "La Vengeance du Kremlin" claims Litvinenko was acting
FOR the FSB/GRU, accidentally poisoning himself whilst preparing the dose, and
Cameron covered up the poisoning for political reasons as he was trying to get
things from Putin. I thought they were interesting books presenting a non-
mainstream POV (and "higher up gossip") but not as insightful as the early
ones, and more political.

Fun fact: De Villiers selected the cover girls himself in the street,
sometimes asking his contacts for "the right kind of girl" (said in a Helmut
Newton accent).

France is the elephant in the room in all the novels, especially considering
many of the locations.

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carregerar
This is not of interest to HN readers.

~~~
mkohlmyr
I thouroughly enjoyed the read so I suppose I should be on my way then.

I struggle to see the purpose of a comment like this when a good chunk of the
point of an algorithm/crowd driven news aggregator is that we don't have to
defer to one persons finger in the wind judgement on the matter. We can just
wait and find out.

