While Fleming loaded down his hero with the latest gadgets and ingenious weaponry, Malko prefers the elegant simplicity of a single exquisite pistol, as slim and smooth as the finest gold cigarette case, and the sort of first-rate mind and indomitable will that once might have ruled Europe. Bond, with his swaggering pride in his handmade shirts and classic Bentley, is a poor country cousin compared to Malko, whose home is the ancestral castle in Liezen and whose altesse status means he is already as exalted as one can get. If Bond was defined in part by his social climber’s appreciation of the finer things in life, Malko’s exquisite taste is a given, bred in the bone. His code name “SAS” stands for Son Altesse Serenissime, or His Serene Highness. Malko is a titled aristocrat, an Austro-Hungarian prince done out of his rightful position in the world by the exigencies of democratic republicanism and the cold war. If Ian Fleming’s James Bond was often criticized for his snobbish tastes, France’s answer to Fleming, Gerard de Villiers, made such charges superfluous in the character of Prince Malko von Linge, the su-perspy hero of the best-selling and long-running SAS series of spy novels.
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