The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much (2013)

nytimes.com

115 pointsableal30 comments

> 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.

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.

> 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'.

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.

And Le Care was a real spook (SIS) - he had had to leave because he was burned by Philby.

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.

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).

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), you can find books that have been written by students who became famous authors.

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.

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.

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.

But the general public is not looking to academic scholars to figure out what they should approve of. Critics generally don't care to review Harlequin or SAS novels and the people that read them definitely don't need their opinions. I don't follow what argument you're making nor why it makes the matter arbitrary.

We'll have to agree to disagree, I find De Villiers' writing bland at best, and very repetitive. That said, yes, you probably find some decent writers within the genre.

Re sex scenes, have you ever seen a French movie. If not, I have news for you.

Other countries find coitus for non-procreational purposes to not be a bad thing!

I've seen a number of French movies (being French myself), but what does have to do with anything? There is a difference between complaining about the presence of a sex scene and deploring the repetitiveness and bad writing.

"The covers always feature a overly made-up, blonde, Eastern European"

No, not only blondes, not only Eastern European:

http://dangerousminds.net/tag/G%C3%A9rard-de-Villiers

http://dangerousminds.net/content/uploads/images/001995716--...

http://www.carti-online.com/sas-mafia-drogurilor-p-1025.html

Side question. Was recently in the tabac in Valence TGV looking for a book by Fred Vargas to read, I find detective novels are a good way to practice my French when over on cycling trips (easier reading level than, say, Zazie dans le Metro). Anyway - this place had novels by authors from A-M...then two books by an author beginning X. Half the alphabet dropped due to lack of shelf space! The missing V section makes me curious -

would de Villiers have been missing? Would it be under D or V in a french bookstore?

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=...

Thank you. When the article first popped in the NYTimes I couldn't easily find English copies of his books. I was curious, but didn't follow through.

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-...

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 ...

I blew that, my apologies.

This isn't the same author.

Died later that year :-/ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/europe/gerard-de-vil...

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

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

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.

This is not of interest to HN readers.

Not at all

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.

Quite a few of us feel otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com