The book was the latest by Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old Frenchman who has been turning out the S.A.S. espionage series at the rate of four or five books a year for nearly 50 years. The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves. Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.”

Though he is almost unknown in the United States, de Villiers’s publishers estimate that the S.A.S. series has sold about 100 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. S.A.S. may be the longest-running fiction series ever written by a single author. The first book, “S.A.S. in Istanbul,” appeared in March 1965; de Villiers is now working on No. 197.

For all their geopolitical acumen, de Villiers’s books tend to provoke smirks from the French literati. (“Sorry, monsieur, we do not carry that sort of thing here,” I was told by the manager at one upscale Paris bookstore.) It’s not hard to see why. Randomly flip open any S.A.S. and there’s a good chance you’ll find Malko (he is Son Altesse Sérénissime, or His Serene Highness), the aristocratic spy-hero with a penchant for sodomy, in very explicit flagrante. In one recent novel, he meets a Saudi princess (based on a real person who made Beirut her sexual playground) who is both a dominatrix and a nymphomaniac; their first sexual encounter begins with her watching gay porn until Malko distracts her with a medley of acrobatic sex positions. The sex lives of the villains receive almost equal time. Brutal rapes are described in excruciating physiological detail. In another recent novel, the girlfriend of a notorious Syrian general is submitting to his Viagra-fueled brutality when she recalls that this is the man who has terrorized the people of Lebanon for years. “And it was that idea that set off her orgasm,” de Villiers writes.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/gerard-de-villiers-the-spy-novelist-who-knows-too-much.html?partner=rss&emc=rss