The last couple of months have done a lot to remind me of my age with the demise of several pop culture icons who were part of my teenage and young adult years. Sinead O’Connor. Jimmy Buffett.

The worst is David McCallum, or as I always thought of him, Ilya Kuryakin. Yes, I know that he played Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard decades longer than he did Ilya Kuryakin, but he’ll always be Ilya to me.

Who was Ilya Kuryakin?

He was an agent of the United Network Command for Law and its Enforcement. He was Russian and partnered with an American, Napoleon Solo–in the midst of the Cold War. The producers of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. deliberately left Ilya’s back story vague. He was originally supposed to be a limited, secondary character to Robert Vaughn’s Solo. We do, however, get a hint of who he might have been: In the Soviet Navy, per the uniform he wore in one episode; perhaps an ardent communist based on some lines of dialogue about the proletariat; he was serious and focused on his work, based on the occasional near eye-rolls he showed for his partner’s womanizing. Indeed, he quite often was the one being chased, shot at, captured, or tortured while Solo was seducing a woman.

I may be using some hyperbole there. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was created to hang onto the James Bond wave of popularity. Indeed, the concept and the name Solo were contributed by Ian Fleming, a friend of one of the show’s producers.

Ilya was an “international man of mystery” long before anyone ever heard of Austin Powers, and that, of course, made him more than attractive to a generation of teenage girls, myself among them. Ilya was the stuff fantasies are made of, and, yes, teenage girls have fantasies.

In 1964 when the Man from U.N.C.L.E. premiered, we were two years beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis, a year beyond the assassination of a U.S. president some believed was killed by the Soviet Union. The pairing of an American and a Russian to do good and fight the bad guys was unusual enough that parents worried about children being “exposed” to a Soviet. No one ever came out and said Ilya was a Soviet, but given the time, he had to be. No one ever came out and declared him to be a defector either, even if the whole U.N.C.L.E. vs. THRUSH battle was obvious as an allegory for the West vs. the Soviet Union.

McCallum’s acting was sublime. Whether Ilya was impersonating a Mongol warlord or the son of a Nazi general or a college student at an anti-war demonstration, McCallum brought gravitas to even the episodes that devolved into farce. I wondered what was behind that serious, handsome secret agent. As a result of that, I got into trouble for writing U.N.C.L.E. fan fiction in English class. (Of course, that was too long ago for the term “fan fiction,” but hindsight explained that’s what it was.)

My English teacher told me to keep writing but to stick to the assignments she gave in class, and she also suggested I look into Russian history.

I did both of those things. I concentrated in Russian History in college, and in the early 1990s when I figured out I really wanted to write fiction and spy fiction in particular, I remembered Ilya Kuryakin. (And, yes, I spell his name the Russian way, with one L.) Ilya was the inspiration for my male protagonist Alexei Bukharin, who is Russian–“Actually, I’m Ukrainian.”–and a defector from the Soviet Union who joins a super-secret intelligence organization called the United Nations Intelligence Directorate.

That’s the limit of the connection, because I’ve built far more back story into Alexei than Ilya could have dreamed of. Oh, there’s one more slight connection. McCallum was the son of classical musicians who groomed him to be a musician as well. (I have one of his albums. Of course.) In several U.N.C.L.E. episodes, Ilya is seen playing a musical instrument, but again, McCallum was a musician; he was really playing. In interviews McCallum has said that all he knew about Ilya was he had a small apartment and jazz records under his bed. Under his bed because in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, jazz was nekulturny or unacceptable. So, I made Alexei a piano prodigy in the Soviet Union, and he buys a piano for his small apartment after his defection.

So, what does a writer do after her inspiration passes on?

Keep on writing. Alexei isn’t Ilya, and Ilya isn’t dead even if the actor who portrayed him so well and so iconically is. As long as there is television and streaming and DVDs, Ilya goes on and on. Inspiration continues and will until I write my last word.

Thank you, Ilya, but most of all thank you, David.

P.S., David, I long ago forgave you for marrying a woman from my home town who wasn’t me. pad