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 authors wallet on Air France Villiers wrote 200 SAS novels De Villiers books are well known in Frenchspeaking countries for their indepth insider knowledge of such subjects as espionage geopolitics and terrorist threats as well as their hardcore 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 topselling series in history on a par with Ian Flemings James Bond books SAS may be the longestrunning 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 Englishspeaking 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 Source Article Gérard de Villiers from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30