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| OSS117 collected novels (1968), art by Ferenc Pinter |
As you probably have guessed, by "europulp" I define the kind of popular fiction (in literature, comics, TV and movies) coming from western continental Europe and not in English language. Since the subject is much wider than you might think, I plan to deal (mostly) with the Mediterranean area, which I'm more familiar with. In this blog "pulp" is neither a derogative word, nor the definition employed in Italy in the 90's to brand a few authors that happened to be somehow close to the noir/horror genres.
There's a particular side of europulp which I decided to call "eurospy".
The term "eurospy" has been used for the 1960's Italian-French-Spanish-German film co-productions featuring secret agents. A few of those movies were based on French novels, among them the ones by Jean Bruce. His character was Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, aka OSS117, who had appeared in books since 1949 and on screen since 1957, before Ian Fleming's 007. Just like James Bond, OSS117 is now expected in a new movie as soon as European theatres will open after the Covid-19 pandemic.
But, with due exceptions, most of those 60's movies were just exploitation, parodies or camp versions of the James Bond phenomenon. Some viewers might remember Operation Kid Brother, known in Italy as OK Connery (1967), starring Neil Connery (Sean's real brother) as "the famous secret agent's brother", plus several actors from the Bond films. Or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1966), starring spaghetti western star Giuliano Gemma and bearing the same title as a song from Thunderball (1965). Moreover, most ot the secret agents were voiced in Italy by Pino Locchi, one of the stars of Italian dubbing, who also gave his voice to Sean Connery (and later both George Lazenby and Roger Moore) in the Bond films.
Eurospy movies were often marketed in Italy with titles containing the numbers 070, 077 or 777, in the hope they might be mistaken for 007 movies, even when based on characters such as Francis Coplan, agent FX18, from the French novels by Paul Kenny, that had been published in Italy. But the distributors didn't mind that.
In the end, somehow, eurospy contaminated the original Bond movies: not only You Only Live Twice (1967) looked a lot like a high-budget eurospy set in Japan, but later in time some of the Bond action sequences would borrow ideas, stunts and gags from it: see for instance the ski pursuit in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and For Your Eyes Only (1981).
Many of the 60's eurospy directors - I'd say most of them - were Italian and worked as well on spaghetti western in the 60's and in giallo or poliziottesco in the 70's. But in the 60's, spy movies had a huge market in Italy, not only due to Bondmania, but because spy stories were a familiar item to readers. I already mentioned the Italian Segretissimo book series, entirely devoted to the subgenre, from publisher Mondadori. British, American and French spy stories were a common reading in Italy, thanks to Mondadori, Garzanti and a few other publishers.
Both in France and Italy those novels were considered romans de gare, romanzi ferroviari, the kind of pocket-books you buy in a newsstand at a railway station (or an airport). In Italy Segretissimo was actualy a hybrid between a book and a magazine, following the succesful formula of Il Giallo Mondadori (for detective novels) and Urania (for science-fiction novels) from the same publisher: a format similar to Jerry Cotton and Perry Rhodan in Germany.
But, unlike the eurospy movies, even the most pulp-style spy novels had a comparatively serious approach, being inspired by the daily chronicles of the Cold War, often mixed with a certain amount of exotic adventure. That too sounded familiar to Italian readers. When I started reading Ian Fleming - published in Italy by Garzanti, at the time - I noticed how much he unknowingly had in common with Italy's great adventure writer Emilio Salgari (1862-1911), whose influence is undeniable in many Italian spywriters today: Stefano Di Marino has often been called "the modern Salgari".
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| The latest reprint of S.A.S. vol.1 (2015) |
But there were no Italian spywriters at the time. As I'm explaining in the posts about giallo in this blog, Italian readers were not interested in thrillers - of any kind - by Italian authors and they wouldn't be for a very long time.
For decades, eurospy novels were essentially made in France. featuring heroes born in Europe or of European descent, though they often operated worldwide for US intelligence agencies. Bruce's OSS 117 was a former OSS agent working for the CIA.
The top bestselling spywriter from France was - and still is - the late Gérard De Villiers, creator of S.A.S. Malko Linge, Austrian prince and contractor for the CIA. The 200 S.A.S. novels published between 1965 and 2013 have been noted for their sexual content (though sex is not so unusual in espionage, is it?) and might not be always considered politically correct. But another key element stands out: the stories usually deal with real international tensions and events, of which De Villiers gave his own interpretation. Sometimes his solution of unsolved cases of espionage turned out to be correct.
It was the continuing success of De Villiers and Segretissimo in Italy that would finally open the way to Italian spywriters.
To be continued...
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