Author of the week: Gérard de Villiers

last updated 8 January 2015

Gérard de Villiers knows too much, said Robert F. Worth in The New York Times. Among his peers, the secret of his productivity might be reason enough for envy: At 83, the tireless Frenchman is still cranking out five spy novels a year, bringing his career total to 196 and counting. But more astounding are the details he packs into each airport paperback between his trademark sex scenes. In 1980, one of his novels spookily foreshadowed the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In last year’s Les Fous de Benghazi, he focused on the city’s then-secret CIA command center and its agents’ battle with local jihadists. It’s said that even French presidents have long been De Villiers readers—except Nicolas Sarkozy. “He pretends to read me,” De Villiers says.

De Villiers seems to have talked to more spies in more intelligence agencies than any journalist. Still, he doesn’t claim to have a special talent for extracting agents’ secrets. “They want the information to get out,” he says. “They always have a motive.” Observers speculate that many real-life spies simply want to see their work immortalized in a pulpy French novel, and because they trust De Villiers, they use him as an intelligence dump. “I write fairy tales for adults,” he says. But if the writer is doing the world’s spies any favors, he’s not fool enough to assume that would win him any protection if he crossed the wrong real-life villain. “Intelligence people don’t give a damn about civilian lives,” he says. “They are cold fish.”