“I am resolutely of the right, against communism, socialism and Islam, but I am no racist,” he stated. He admitted that his hero shared some of his sexist and right-wing views which became increasingly tiresome and passé, and certainly politically incorrect as time wore on. Having risen to the bait of his editor, who encouraged him to fill the void left by Ian Fleming’s death in 1964, he created Prince Malko.Īccording to de Villiers, the character who first appeared in SAS à Istanbul in 1965 was “a composite of three real-life people: a chef de mission with the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, a German baron who owned a castle in Swabia and an Austrian arms dealer.” Indeed, de Villiers had a knack for incorporating the colourful types he met on his travels into his novels but usually changed just enough tell-tale details to get away with it. He then worked as a journalist for Paris-Presse, France Dimanche and Paris Match and reported on the Vietnam War as well as profiling celebrities holidaying on the French Riviera. A graduate of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme, he served as an officer during the Algerian War. None the less Random House had recently offered him a deal to translate and publish five of his books in the US.īorn in Paris in 1929, he was the son of what he called a “womanising playwright” and an aristocrat mother. The brace of film adaptations of de Villiers novels made in the 1980s also failed to gain international traction. However, the Bond franchise overshadowed the SAS books, which didn’t really gain a foothold in the Anglo-Saxon world despite their popularity in translation in countries like Germany, Japan and Russia. Prince Malko was occasionally compared to James Bond. “I consider myself a storyteller who writes to amuse people.” “I never had any pretensions of being a literary writer,” he said last year. He claimed each book took six to eight weeks and he succeeded in cramming five into each of the last eight years of his life as he reached the 200 mark with La Vengeance Du Kremlin – The Kremlin’s Revenge – last month. These lurid covers mirrored the racy content, glamorous settings and fast-moving intrigues of the pulp thrillers de Villiers typed on an old IBM electric typewriter at the rate of four a year. SAS also alluded to the British army unit and made for an eye-catching logo out of which stared the inevitable femme fatale with plunging neckline and gun in hand. The hero was known as SAS after an acronym based on his codename in French: Son Altesse Sérénissime.
Known as “romans de gare”, these formulaic page-turners all featured Malko Linge, an Austrian prince freelancing for the CIA and using his espionage income to restore and run his ancestral home. In his native France, the 200 SAS spy novels written by Gérard de Villiers were a staple of popular culture and sold in their millions.
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