Christopher Stevens in Libya, de Villiers’s novel Les Fous de Benghazi ( The Madmen of Benghazi), which details the battle between the CIA and North African jihadis in post-Gaddafi Libya, was released. Six months before murder of the American ambassador J. Despite the wear and tear of decades of writing, de Villiers’s ability to read and translate geopolitical events for his audience never waned.
Famously, a 1980 novel by de Villiers has Islamist radicals killing the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat a full year before the event actually occurred.
The attention was reciprocated, and every profile of de Villiers makes sure to mention that he is a favorite in intelligence circles.ĭe Villiers’s deep links with real espionage often gave him the dual air of an “inside man” and a paperback Nostradamus. It’s what Americans call ‘faction’”), de Villiers cultivated connections within the security agencies of many countries, especially France.
In some ways always more of a journalist than a fiction writer (de Villiers once told an interviewer that: “I work with reality. While these jaunts certainly provided material for de Villiers, they were nothing in comparison to de Villiers’s sources. De Villiers’s typical routine was to travel for two weeks in the countries which invariably populate his often exotic novels, then spend six weeks writing.
Like the Belgian detective fiction writer Georges Simenon, whose own Inspector Maigret series rivals de Villiers’s SAS catalogue, de Villiers’s output is so staggering that it’s hard to believe that he did not employ a small army of ghostwriters and researchers.Īs Worth’s article makes clear, de Villiers was a one-man show who not only wrote every single word in his books, but it was also him and him alone who did all of the legwork. From there, de Villiers’s incredible work rate took over, and by the time of his death, de Villiers had sold over 100 million copies and had written almost 200 spy novels. In fact, the inspiration behind de Villiers’s transition from journalism to fiction had to do with an editor’s not-so serious challenge in the wake of Fleming’s untimely demise: “You should take over.”Īpparently that was all it took. Beginning in 1965, de Villiers’s novels very quickly filled the gap left by the passing of Ian Fleming. Unstated in Worth’s piece is the fact that de Villiers, a bon vivant of the highest order, was also probably cherished by his contemporaries because he lived a life similar to Malko Linge, the Austrian aristocrat who freelances for the CIA in de Villiers’s long-running SAS (short for Son Altesse sérénissime, or “His Serene Highness”) series of novels. Worth wrote in his 2013 profile of de Villiers for the New York Times, despite being “despised by many on the French left for his right-wing political views,” de Villiers had become a sort of institution in his home country because of his seemingly unstoppable success. A lifelong Parisian, de Villiers was at the time eulogized for being one of the Francophone world’s most beloved spy fiction writers and the one popular novelist that French intellectuals actually read (although few would ever fess up to it).
On Halloween of last year, Gérard de Villiers died at the age of 83.