I read French for obvious reasons. And, since a few months
now, I reside near Brussels…
Jean Bruce started his famous series OSS 117 in 1950, and as
far as I remember the best was in the first part of his
production, as the high rate of output eroded quickly the
basic qualities. Bruce was slightly better than most of his
colleagues of the French popular lit. found at the time in
collections publishing the lower end of French mystery,
adventure and spy novels. As I was never very attracted by
these mass produced (even so on the writing level ) spy
novels of the 50's and 60's (Bruce and others) I read only
few of them compared to the production. The first batch of
OSS 117's was published by the well known "Fleuve Noir "
French publishing house that published a total 1905 titles
for spy novels only, all locally written, from 1950 to 1987
in their
"Espionnage" collection. Fleuve Noir produced a lot of
different cheap collections all of the mass paperback format
(approx 200 pages/ 220 max) and always originals. Bruce wrote
also some mysteries for FN.
Later, in 1953, after 18 books with OSS 117, and already very
successful, Bruce switched to a competitor: "Presses de la
Cit馱uot; where the publisher created a collection publishing
only OSS 117's! Bruce died in 1963.
If spy novels of the kind attract you, you will have to read
some by Paul Kenny with his character: Francis Copland,
French spy. To replace Bruce when he left, FN asked to one of
their writers to create a new spy series. The Belgian writer
took a pseudonym Paul Kenny for the new series. After
something like 10 novels he teamed up with another Belgian
writer and still under the Kenny alias they produced hugely
successful spy novels with Copland as the hero. After 130
titles, in 1973, FN created a special collection publishing
only the Copland novels. The total sales for Copland's were
never really known. But in 1965 they had already sold a total
of 16 million copies since the beginning. The success of
these novels was tremendous for the size of the French
market. I personally never liked Kenny's novels, a lot of
them being rather badly written.
To-day, Fleuve Noir, like a lot of popular lit publishers,
shrunk and near-collapsed under difficulties due to the
disappearing readership, but was lately revived producing
trade paperbacks now at outrageous prices (15 USD) with
writers far from FN's roots and translations. But with
writers of value like the Italian Andrea Camilleri and his
police inspector Montalbano for instance.
If you are interested by real hard-boiled/noir lit. try to
read the recent French production (I understand you read
French?) by authors that were never (or rarely) translated in
English and you will also discover with them how a different
culture handles this genre. You will find a few names of
authors on my web site POLAR NOIR, at: http://www.geocities.com/polarnoir
and also in the S鲩e Noire Chapter of Hard-Boiled
Mysteries.
And… welcome to the list.
E.Borgers Hard-Boiled Mysteries http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384
--- Jeremy Duns <
jeremyduns@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi there. I joined last week,
SNIP
>
> One reason I like Semyonov is that it gives me
the
> chance to see the world from the perspective
of
> another culture. I am getting more into spy
stories
> not written by Brits or Americans. In this vein,
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
>
>
>
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