de Villiers then created his signature spy hero, Malko Linge, by blending three real-life acquaintances: a French intelligence official, an Austrian arms dealer and a German baron. That adventure, he later said, left him with a taste for intrigue.Ī decade later, he was working on a detective novel in his spare time when an editor told him that Ian Fleming had died. His first encounter with spies was almost a fatal one: During a reporting assignment in Tunisia, he agreed to do a favor for a French intelligence officer and discovered that he was a pawn in an assassination scheme. de Villiers wrote for France Soir and other newspapers in the 1950s. His father was a prolific playwright, often absent from home, who went by the stage name Jacques Deval.Īfter his military service, Mr. 8, 1929, to a middle-class family with aristocratic origins. Gérard de Villiers was born in Paris in Dec.
But his politics were partly provocation, and he earned a grudging respect from some liberals in recent years. de Villiers loved to flaunt his right-wing political views and was often labeled a racist and anti-Semite by French intellectuals. He set up his own publishing line a decade ago, increasing his profits, which ran from $1 million to $1.3 million a year. Generations of readers have become familiar with the lurid covers of his SAS books - always a scantily clad woman clutching a gun - at supermarkets and railway stations across France.
de Villiers continued to travel to Afghanistan, Mali, Libya and other war zones. Even after suffering a torn aorta in 2010 that left him dependent on a walker, Mr. The last, “La Vengeance du Kremlin,” published in October, is No.
As a writer, he was unapologetically formulaic he called his books “fairy tales for adults” and cranked out five a year in recent years, with no help.
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