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.
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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