According to the New York Times, "His works have been translated and are especially popular in Germany, Russia, Turkey, and Japan.
GERARD DE VILLIERS SAS 173 SERIES
de Villiers’s own fictional protagonist, was from an old aristocratic family, a man of great charisma who helped build a clandestine network of operatives to fight Soviet spies in Africa and the Middle East.Gérard de Villiers ( French: 8 December 1929 – 31 October 2013) was a French writer, journalist and publisher whose SAS series of spy novels have been major bestsellers. de Villiers formed a bond with Alexandre de Marenches, a legendary Cold War spy chief who directed France’s foreign intelligence service from 1970 to 1981. He is survived by a son, a daughter and four grandchildren.
de Villiers did not disguise his own struggles with fidelity married four times, he was estranged from his wife at the time of his death. Malko is continuously unfaithful to his Austrian fiancée, Alexandra, but never at home. He pivots between an Old World life of hunting and galas in Austria and deadly spy missions in conflict zones around the world. Malko Linge is a far cry from James Bond: He is an Austrian aristocrat who works on contract for the Central Intelligence Agency, mainly to make money for the upkeep of his castle. de Villiers then created his signature spy hero, Malko Linge, by blending three real-life acquaintances: a French intelligence official, an Austrian arms dealer and a German baron. That adventure, he later said, left him with a taste for intrigue.Ī decade later, he was working on a detective novel in his spare time when an editor told him that Ian Fleming had died.
His first encounter with spies was almost a fatal one: during a reporting assignment in Tunisia, he agreed to do a favor for a French intelligence officer and discovered he was a pawn in an assassination scheme. de Villiers wrote for France Soir and other newspapers in the 1950s. His father was a prolific playwright, often absent from home, who went by the stage name Jacques Deval.Īfter his military service, Mr. 8, 1929, to a middle-class family with aristocratic origins.
Gérard de Villiers was born in Paris on Dec. But his politics were partly provocation, and he earned a grudging respect from some liberals in recent years. de Villiers loved to flaunt his right-wing political views and was often labeled a racist and anti-Semite by French intellectuals. He set up his own publishing line a decade ago, increasing his profits, which ran from $1 million to $1.3 million a year. books - always a scantily clad woman clutching a gun - at supermarkets and railway stations across France. Generations of readers have become familiar with the lurid covers of his S.A.S. de Villiers continued to travel to Afghanistan, Mali, Libya and other war zones. Even after suffering a torn aorta in 2010 that left him dependent on a walker, Mr. The last, “La Vengeance du Kremlin,” published in October, is No. And after the Arab uprisings broke out in 2011, he wrote books about the civil wars in Syria and Libya that eerily prefigured some of the worst violence there.Īs a writer, he was unapologetically formulaic he called his books “fairy tales for adults” and cranked out five a year in recent years, with no help.
On several famous occasions he was even ahead of the news: In 1980 he wrote a novel in which Islamist militants kill President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt a year before the actual assassination took place. In between the sex scenes, his books often contained details of terrorist attacks, espionage and war that had not appeared anywhere else. He cultivated spies and diplomats, and he insinuated himself so thoroughly into their world that many sought him out and were then delighted to see themselves appear - always under different names - in his novels.Ī string of French presidents and foreign ministers read him regularly and praised his geopolitical acumen, though rarely in public. de Villiers remained a journalist at heart, and his books were based on constant travel and reporting in dozens of countries. may be the longest-running fiction series ever written by a single author, and one of the best selling.įor all the kinky sex and gunplay that fueled his plots, Mr. Though largely unknown in the Anglophone world, S.A.S.
GERARD DE VILLIERS SAS 173 CODE
de Villiers created his own fictional spy hero - Son Altesse Sérénissime, or His Serene Highness, was his code name - in 1964. de Villiers was often compared to Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who served as an inspiration when Mr. The cause was cancer, his lawyer, Eric Morain, said. Gérard de Villiers, a French popular novelist whose raffish, long-running spy-thriller series, S.A.S., sold more than 100 million copies and became a kind of drop box for real-world secrets from intelligence agencies around the world, died on Thursday in Paris.
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