Gérard de Villiers was one of France’s most popular novelists, but his country’s leaders turned up their noses at his sex-packed spy tales—while secretly poring over their well-sourced details. “The French elite pretend not to read him,” said former Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine. “But they all do.”
De Villiers, the son of a notorious womanizer, was raised by his mother and two sisters, said Le Monde (France). As a foreign affairs reporter during the 1950s, he built up a source network among intelligence officials and diplomats. After Ian Fleming died in 1964, an editor friend urged him to “take over.” De Villiers took three characters he knew—a French intelligence official, a German baron, and an arms dealer—and by “knitting their DNA” together created Malko Linge, aka S.A.S., an Austrian aristocrat who spied for the CIA. “No one would have taken a Frenchman seriously,” he explained. “Besides cheese and wine, nothing about us is credible abroad.”
Article continues belowThe Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
De Villiers “became a kind of drop box for real-world secrets” from the world’s spy agencies, said The New York Times, and he cast his novels with fictional versions of spooks he had met. His routine was arduous: He would spend two weeks in whatever country he was writing about, and then six weeks writing each book, churning out four or five a year. He dreamed of S.A.S. becoming a Hollywood icon like James Bond, and his lasting regret was that his books were so little known outside his homeland. “I bear the curse,” he once said, “of being French.”