ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The Professional, code name of Chance Renard, is a literary character created by the writer Stefano Di Marino and signed with his alter ego Stephen Gunn.

Biography of the character
Chance Renard was born in Brussels (Belgium) on 28 March 1961. His father Robert "LaVolpe" Renard is a retired and peaceless mercenary. In twenty-one years Chance, raised with his mother Nadege and her new husband, finds the father's diaries of adventure, now tired and sick. He decides to escape from home, leave studies and enter the Foreign Legion.

He faced the baptism of fire in 1982 during the civil war in Lebanon, but carried out missions in Chad, Iraq, Indochina and various other places where he was sent by the Legion.

Reached the rank of lieutenant on returning from a training course in French Guyana, Chance is unjustly accused of the death of a comrade. From here begins his adventures told in novels. For a while he uses the pseudonym LaVolpe then, rehabilitated by the Legion, works as an off-screen agent for various agencies and individuals.

Perhaps it is one of the few secret agents born in the wake of the success of 007 to have carried out missions for the Russian SVR.

Literary biography
The character of Chance Renard was born from a project never made for the Granata Press comic publishing house. Repeated a few years later it became a serial on the pages of Segretissimo, the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore series dedicated to thriller and spy-story.

The idea of departure was to "test" the audience with three initial adventures written with an eye to the old heroes of the head and hope to emulate the success of SAS of Gérard de Villiers. Successful operation, so much so that for twelve years the Professional has become one of the columns of Segretissimo, with 24 episodes published, countless stories some of which appeared with the signature of his true author.

Since 2004 the publishing house TEA (Longanese) has begun to reprint the series in books from bookstores, revised, elongated and accompanied by articles on the processing signed by the author.

His adventures continue successfully. This is evidence of the anthology Professional Gun, where there are stories that see him the protagonist signed by all colleagues of the Forino Legion of Segretissimo, the Italian authors who sign with foreign pseudonyms. Among them François Torrent, Joe Lancaster Reno and Jack Morisco.

Bibliography reasoned
Along with the bibliography, there are short notes provided by the author himself.

1. 1995 - Raid in Kourou, Segretissimo n. 1279, reed in 2004 by the TEA under the title Shadow Commando (ISBN 8850206550)
The second version is the final one. Revisioned in language, the novel stretches out some chapters and develops some traits left somewhat unresolved in the first version. There is all the disillusionment towards the Legion as an institution, we intuit the figure of the father and we know some comprimari. Barontini, Sylviette and Peter Hande