Jean de La Hire

Who was Jean de La Hire?

Jean de La Hire was a prolific French author of numerous popular adventure, science fiction and romance novels.

Adolphe d'Espie was born on 28 January 1878 in Banyuls-sur-Mer, Pyrénées-Orientales. He was a scion of an old French noble family dating back the reign of Saint Louis, which gave the ancient city of Toulouse a Capitoul during the Middle Age. He was a soldier during World War I. He died during 1956 at Nice as a result of a congestion of the lungs due to chronic pulmonary problems from having been gassed during that war.

At the age of twenty, the only son of the last Comte d'Espie chose the pseudonym "Jean de la Hire", clearly indicating the admiration he dedicated to La Hire, legendary comrade of Joan of Arc, claiming to be his descendant. As numerous young ambitious provinciaux eagerly wanting literary fame and fortune, he migrated to Paris with the support of his uncle, the then already famous sculptor Aristide Maillol. But his debuts were not very successful and, after he was not awarded the Prix Goncourt, he abandoned classic literature and decided to author more popular novels of the roman populaire genre.

During his lifetime, he authored more than 300 novels and short-stories, some published with more than 100,000 issues, the most popular being his super-science works - and among them the Nyctalope series. Most of them - mainly in the dime novels style: detective novels, adventures, romances, western stories, etc. - were published as series in popular newspapers, magazines and quarterlies.