Media scandals are often just cat pee when you've read Marc Dugain

The scandals that the press highlights are often nothing more than cat pee and starling rupee when you have read the gripping novels of Marc Dugain. He attacks with a machete the well-kept secrets of States, the shenanigans of the French secret services, and economic-mafia interests. Whether in Putin's Russia, in Sarkozy's France or in the United States.

Tsunami de Marc Dugain

Exciting novels that can be read in one go and often brought to the screen. But who is he himself? His son said: “My father, you can love him but you can’t know him.”

His new book responds in part through fiction and combines his entire life and many of his previous books. The hero is, in short, his double and it is difficult to distinguish when he is Marc Dugain and when he is an invention of the novelist. But it doesn't matter as long as you get the exhilaration that comes from reading this book.

It's the story of an ambitious young Frenchman who immersed himself in the world of banking in New York in the mid-1980s. He quickly rose through the ranks and gained a reputation for excellence. Deal Maker, a “deal maker” in the aeronautics department financing dark purchases of Russian, African or Latin American companies.

The Kursk

Marc Dugain combines a difficult private life for his “hero”, a seriously melancholic woman, an affair with Julia his “boss” and moods which lead the young banker to want to quickly be very rich in order to be able to stop serving this “money debauchery” and become a writer.

All the charm of Marc Dugain's novels is to immerse us in this ambitious life and its ambiguities.

A family tragedy forces the hero of his book to leave New York to settle in Geneva where, in the context of the end of the Cold War, he puts his talent as a financier at the service of Western companies attracted by the mountains of money of the oligarchs. There he met Pavel in Siberia who became his friend.

While Russia is gradually sinking into Putin's hell that Marc Dugain had already dissected well in the drama of the Kursk submarine, his link with Pavel attracts the attention of the CIA. Will he betray his friend or leave his job?

Having become rich, he decided to become a writer like Marc Dugain himself.

For his novels, he investigates the Kursk as well as the still unexplained disaster of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 and the response that Putin gave him in Ukraine.

Built as an enlightening thriller at the heart of places of power in the world, the book is also a reflection by a 67-year-old man on his profession as a writer.

A gnome

Marc Dugain is obsessed with searching for the truths buried beneath the official versions. He has an acute and pessimistic view of our great leaders: “warhe writes, has always been the best remedy to mask the carelessness and corruption of those who lead us.”

They are going to kill Robert Kennedy

Putin is for him “the ghost of a gnome emerged from the basements of the Cheka during the time of Stalinist terror. A thug who one day decided that it was more comfortable to terrorize his own compatriots in the den of real Soviet power.”

He who wrote about Edgar Hoover and the assassination of Robert Kennedy is hardly more tender for the financiers of New York and for the Pentagon which “distributed anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Afghan Islamists so that they could fight the Russians.”

The pleasure of this novel, a “fiction of the author's existence”, is to mix with the “great history” a more personal interrogation where Marc Dugain addresses the intimate dramas he may have experienced.

⇒ The plane, Putin, America… and me | Novel | Marc Dugain | Albin Michel, 347 pp. €22.90, digital €16

EXTRACT

“Terrorism, resulting from a fallacious and criminal appropriation of the Koran, obscured another equally worrying phenomenon, whispered by certain intelligence executives: the increasingly deep penetration of mafia organizations into political systems. Russia was one of them perfect illustration with Putin, who seemed to me closer to a leader of Cosa Nostra than to a classic despot, with the difference that a 'godfather' does not have a nuclear arsenal.”