Re: RARA-AVIS: New member

From: Rene Ribic ( rribic@optusnet.com.au)
Date: 13 May 2002


> I was
> wondering if anyone here had read any of Jean Bruce's
> stuff. He created the French-born CIA agent Hugh
> Bonneville de Bath, OSS 117, a few years before
> Fleming created James Bond, and he wrote around 70 of
> the things. His wife took over after his death,
> followed by their kids. There must be 300 or so books
> in the series - kind of a French Nick Carter. During
> the 60s spy craze, several were "adapted" for the
> silver screen, starring the likes of John Gavin. In
> France and Benelux, these novels (and the dreadful SAS
> series) can be found in just about every used
> bookstore: I picked up six for around a euro the other
> day. A few were translated into English in the
> Sixties, both in America and Britain. Does anyone know
> the books at all? Jeremy
>
>

Hello Jeremy & welcome, I have one or two of this series in paperback but as I don't read French the chance that I'll read any of them are very slim. IIRC, I bought one because the cover looked vaguely familiar - it turns out it was pinched from a Gold Medal paperback, The Violent Ones by Howard (Watergate) Hunt. I must admit the tiger skin bikini was the only reason I bought the book (for about 20c.). those Semyonov books sound interesting. I don't recall the earlier discussion: were they strongly recommended by someone? Are the books available in paperback?

Rene

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 May 2002 EDT