This may be the one time I have really regretted not being able to read French. A story from The New York Times Magazine about the greatest spy novelist of them all, a man by name of Gérard de Villiers. This is the first para and if it doesn’t get you in then don’t bother with the rest:

Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title Le Chemin de Damas. Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents. Set in the midst of Syria’s civil war, the book offered vivid character sketches of that country’s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his brother Maher, along with several little-known lieutenants and allies. It detailed a botched coup attempt secretly supported by the American and Israeli intelligence agencies. And most striking of all, it described an attack on one of the Syrian regime’s command centers, near the presidential palace in Damascus, a month before an attack in the same place killed several of the regime’s top figures. ‘It was prophetic,’ I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. ‘It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.’