热拉尔·德·维利耶

热拉尔·德·维利耶（1929年12月8日 - 2013年10月31日）是法国作家、新闻工作者和出版商，他创作了不少谍报小说。

热拉尔·德·维利耶的父亲是一位剧作家。 热拉尔·德·维利耶毕业于巴黎政治学院。

20世纪50年代法国日报开始刊登他的文章，同时他又成为一名驻外记者。此时他开始对情报工作感兴趣。 1964年，热拉尔·德·维利耶开始创作和出版谍报小说。他在军方和情报部门有一些熟人，这些人很乐意向热拉尔·德·维利耶透露他们是如何参与谍报工作的。 他将他的间谍小说起了个名字，叫作《SAS》。第一部《SAS》于1965年出版。这部小说讲述的是奥地利王子兼中央情报局特工马尔科·林格（Malko Linge）的冒险故事。

热拉尔·德·维利耶一共写了 200部以SAS为名的小说。为了让小说看起来更真，他经常亲临战场，进行研究和采访。在写小说前，他通常会先花15天研究战场，然后再用六周的时间完成写作。

Gérard de Villiers (French: [ʒeʁaʁ də vilje]; 8 December 1929 – 31 October 2013) was a French writer, journalist and publisher whose SAS series of spy novels have been major bestsellers.

Life

Born in Paris in 1929, Villiers was the son of playwright Jacques Adam de Villiers (known by his stage name of Jacques Deval) and his wife. His father was both prolific and a spendthrift. The younger Villiers attended high school and graduated from Sciences Po university in Paris. He also obtained a degree from the École supérieure de journalisme de Paris.

He began writing during the 1950s for France Soir, a French daily, and became a foreign correspondent. He found "the blend of risk and cold calculation" in intelligence work to be "seductive". In 1964 Villiers began to write and publish spy novels. He had acquaintances among the military and intelligence services who enjoyed helping Villiers describe them and their acts in fiction. He is the author of the spy novel series SAS, publishing his first volume in 1965. It tells the adventures of the Austrian prince and CIA agent Malko Linge, referred to in the first title as "SAS" (Son Altesse Sérénissime i.e. "His Serene Highness").

Villiers wrote 200 SAS novels. De Villiers' books are well known in French-speaking countries for their in-depth insider knowledge of such subjects as espionage, geopolitics, and terrorist threats, as well as their hard-core sex scenes. According to the New York Times, "His works have been translated and are especially popular in Germany, Russia, Turkey, and Japan. The SAS series has sold a reported 120 million copies worldwide, which would make it one of the top-selling series in history, on a par with Ian Fleming's James Bond books. SAS may be the longest-running fiction series ever written by a single author". In addition to France, they were translated and popular in Germany, Russia, Turkey, and Japan; and, since some have been published in English since 2014, in the United States and other English-speaking countries. They are said to be studied by various intelligence services and enjoyed by successive French heads of state.

Villiers published four titles per year between 1966 and 2005, increasing his production to five per year between 2006 and his death in 2013. Usually the locale of the story is featured in the title (as in, Les amazones de Pyongyang' [The Amazons of Pyongyang] or Putsch à Ouagadougou [Coup in Ouagadougou]). Villiers was well known for writing novels that incorporated contemporary events, such as wars or terrorist threats. He frequently visited theaters of operation, doing research and interviews to ground his stories with accurate facts. He typically researched each book for 15 days on location and then wrote it in another six weeks.

His sales were at a maximum during the 1980s, but during the early 21st century Villiers was still earning "between 800,000 and a million euros a year (roughly $1 million to $1.3 million)" for his books. This enabled him to keep a villa in St. Tropez and a "grand house" on Avenue Foch in Paris.

Villiers's mastery of international politics sometimes resulted in his publishing books that seem "prophetic". His Le Chemin de Damas (2012) was set in the middle of Syria's 21st-century civil war, and it described an attack on a government command center near the presidential palace, a month before such an attack took place. In an earlier book, he portrayed the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat before the fact. Due to tips from spies, he was nearly finished writing SAS: The Hunt for Carlos when the freelance assassin known as Carlos the Jackal was captured.

English translations

During the mid-1970s, Pinnacle Books published a dozen of the early SAS novels in English, which are now out of print. They include The Belfast Connection (ISBN 0-523-00844-9, Furie à Belfast) in 1976.