Pierre Daninos, who has died at the age of 91, had a successful career as a journalist in the 1930s. After the second world war, he won a major literary prize in 1947 with The Notebook Of The Good God. He had an even greater success with the notebooks of a mere mortal; in 1954, in the columns of Le Figaro, he introduced the character of Major W Marmaduke Thompson.
Daninos purported to be translating into French the notebooks of an Englishman, a retired Indian army officer, married to a Frenchwoman and living in France. The humorous columns were collected in book form and these sold in enormous numbers; they were translated into some 30 languages and in France alone sold well over a million copies - 300,000 just in the Livre de Poche edition.
In his poem addressed to a louse, Robert Burns wished for the gift to see ourselves as others see us, and distinguished literary attempts to do just that had been made by Montesquieu in 1721 in his Persian Letters - reports of Louis XIV's Paris as seen through the eyes of two fictitious Persian visitors. A foreigner sees things differently, as if looking through the wrong end of a telescope. And few have exploited the false perspective more profitably than Daninos, although he used it to strengthen preconceptions rather than undermine them.
Major Thompson, with his bowler hat (chapeau melon), tightly rolled umbrella, neatly clipped moustache, and Savile Row tailoring was about as authentically representative of the average Englishman in the days of Clement Attlee's government as the beret-sporting, Gauloise-smoking, onion-selling accordionist, with a loaf of bread under his arm, was typical of the Frenchman of the day.
The publication of the notebooks in English in 1955, as Major Thompson Lives In France And Discovers The French, produced an exotic hybrid, since it was the translation from French into English of what purported to be a translation from English into French. (And the illustrator, Walter Goetz, was German-born.) Nobody was worried by these distorting removes from what might loosely be called reality, and national stereotypes were soothingly massaged all round. Yet that well-mannered, well-dressed, stiff-upper-lip English stereotype has proved immensely robust, despite the strenuous efforts of English lager louts and football yobs.
Perhaps Mrs Peel's bowler-hatted partner, Steed, in The Avengers, prolonged the stereotype's lifespan; other odd ingredients in the mix must include Jeeves and possibly 007.
In the English translations of the adventures of Tintin, the bowlered and umbrella-ed detectives are called Thomson and Thompson. The Englishman abroad, especially in France, is a well-tried formula, most recently exploited by Peter Mayle.
Whether the joke of Thompson was at the expense of the French or the English didn't much matter since it wasn't all that funny. Nor was it original. André Maurois had done it rather better as long ago as 1918, in The Silences Of Colonel Bramble, while the emigré Hungarian George Mikes covered similar - sometimes identical - ground in 1946 in How To Be An Alien. Mikes commented that the world consists of two sorts of people; 50 million British and four billion foreigners. With the substitution of French for British, an almost similar remark was attributed to Daninos some years later.
In the past few days, French obituaries have presented Daninos, who was born in Paris, as a well-loved national institution. Examples of his one-liners have been quoted, displaying wit and wisdom that is less that of Oscar Wilde than of Christmas crackers: "The cooking of England is like the country itself - surrounded by water"; "A colleague is someone who has no talent but, inexplicably, does the same job as you do"; "Roadhogs are drivers who overtake you"; "I like to watch children playing: it's a pity I have to hear them as well."
In 1960, Daninos wrote A Certain Monsieur Blot, which did for the business commmunity what the major had done for the French view of the British.
Tributes have come from Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the culture minister and the mayor of Paris. The praise of politicians indicates just how cutting was his wit, how disruptive his humour.
· Pierre Daninos, writer, born May 26 1913; died January 7 2005.