Presumed Dead

Jean Larteguy (5 September 1920 - 23 February 2011)[1] was the nom de plume of Jean Pierre Lucien Osty, a French writer, journalist, and former soldier. He was born in 1920 in Maisons-Alfort, Val-de-Marne and died in 2011.[2] Larteguy is credited with first envisioning the "ticking time bomb" scenario in his 1960 novel Les centurions.[3] "Ron Clark seemed to have everything. Youth. Talent. Good looks. Plus a film-star father who had left hin a vast Swiss bank account. Then suddenly he took a dangerous, ill-paid job covering the war in Indochina for a TV company. And, one day, disappeared. Clark's Zurich bankers instruct Hans Brucker to find their valuable client - dead or alive. Brucker's search leads him to the women, from call-girls to countesses, who had wanted Clark but could not keep him; to Clark's progress through the hip, decadent, sex-and-drugs scene from Geneva to Paris, to London and New York. But it is in battle-ravaged Vietnam that Brucker learns the sickeningly violent truth - about Ron Clark and about a whole disturbed and disillusioned generation." (from the back cover) "Startling and horrific" MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS