Gérard de Villiers

Gérard de Villiers (8 December 1929 – 31 October 2013) was a French writer, journalist and publisher whose SAS series of spy novels have been major bestsellers.

Born in Paris in 1929, Villiers was the son of playwright Jacques Adam de Villiers (known by his stage name of Jacques Deval) and his wife. His father was both prolific and a spendthrift. The younger Villiers attended high school and graduated from Sciences Po university in Paris. He also obtained a degree from the École supérieure de journalisme de Paris.

He began writing in the 1950s for France Soir, a French daily, and became a foreign correspondent. He found "the blend of risk and cold calculation" in intelligence work to be "seductive". In 1964 Villiers began to write and publish spy novels. He continued to cultivate his connections among the military and intelligence services, who enjoyed helping Villiers portray them and their acts in fiction. He is the author of the spy novel series SAS, publishing his first volume in 1965. It tells the adventures of the Austrian prince and CIA agent Malko Linge, referred to in the first title as SAS. This is a play on initials and acronyms: Firstly, Son Altesse sérénissime (SAS) is the French version of "His Serene Highness" (HSH). Secondly, the British Special Air Service (SAS) is the principal special forces unit of the British Army. Thirdly, the SAS series has always included product (airlines and spirits) placement from varying sponsors over the years. One of the first sponsors was Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), which flew the hero around in the beginning, although he later set his heart (and the author's wallet) on Air France.

Villiers wrote 200 SAS novels. De Villiers' books are well known in French-speaking countries for their in-depth insider knowledge of such subjects as espionage, geopolitics, and terrorist threats, as well as their hard-core sex scenes. According to the New York Times, "His works have been translated and are especially popular in Germany, Russia, Turkey, and Japan. The SAS series has sold a reported 120 million copies worldwide, which would make it one of the top-selling series in history, on a par with Ian Fleming's James Bond books. SAS may be the longest-running fiction series ever written by a single author". In addition to France, they were translated and popular in Germany, Russia, Turkey, and Japan; and, since some have been published in English since 2014, in the United States and other English-speaking countries. They are said to be studied by various intelligence services and enjoyed by successive French heads of state.

Villiers published four titles per year between 1966 and 2005, increasing his production to five per year between 2006 and his death in 2013. Usually the locale of the story is featured in the title (as in, Les amazones de Pyongyang' [The Amazons of Pyongyang] or Putsch à Ouagadougou [Coup in Ouagadougou]). Villiers was well known for writing novels that incorporated contemporary events, such as wars or terrorist threats. He frequently visited theaters of operation, doing research and interviews to ground his stories with accurate facts. He typically researched each book by 15 days on location and then wrote it in another six weeks. ...

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