Born to a family of a
magistrate, Monteilhet was educated by the
Jesuits at Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague, a private
Catholic school in
Paris. During the Occupation, he lived in
Auvergne at the family estate in Nouara, near
Ambert. He was tutored by Jean Recanati, a communist and future editor of
L’Humanité, whom Monteilhet’s parents had taken in. After the war, Monteilhet received his degree in history at the
Sorbonne. He first taught history in
Normandy, and then at the Lycée Carnot in
Tunisia from 1959 to 1970. Monteilhet’s debut novel,
The Praying Mantises, was an instant success. It became the winner of the 1960
Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and received
Simon & Schuster's Inner Sanctum Mystery Award for 1962. In the crime novels that followed --
Return from the Ashes,
The Road to Hell,
Prisoner of Love and others — he established himself as a master of
psychological suspense with a very personal style, showing great imagination in his choice of themes and plot twists. In the 1976 novel
Sophie ou les Galanteries exemplaires, for the first time, Monteilhet set his story in a distant past – the 18th century. In 1981, he briefly ventured into the
science fiction genre with
Les Queues de Kallinaos, both a philosophical tale in the style of
Pierre Boulle and a tragedy of paternal love pushed to extremes. Beginning from the 1980s, Monteilhet dedicated himself mostly to
historical fiction. He covered a vast array of subjects: the
Spanish Inquisition in
Les Derniers Feux (1982), Emperor
Nero’s Rome in
Néropolis (1984),
Joan of Arc in
La Pucelle (1988), the times of
Louis XIII and the
Musketeers in ''De plume et d'épée
(1999), and the French Revolution in Les Bouffons'' (2004). He continued writing crime novels from time to time:
Le Procès Filippi (1981),
La Perte de Vue (1986),
Arnaques (2006) and others. For many years, Monteilhet was a
food columnist for the regional newspaper
Sud Ouest Dimanche. He explored his gastronomic preoccupations in the witty crime thrillers
La Part des anges (1992),
Œdipe en Médoc (1993),
Étoiles filantes (1994), and
Le Taureau par les cornes (1994). His last novel, ''Une vengeance d'hiver
, was published in 2012. In 2015, he also wrote the non-fiction book Intox : 1870-1914, la presse française en délire.'' ==Death==