Biography

The "S.A.S" book series written by de Villiers has sold more than 250 million copies throughout the world.

Took his pseudonym from his mother's name Valentine Adam de Villiers. That family living in Reunion island for about 2 centuries has many army or naval officers in its mist.

Began as a reporter on international affairs for French newspaper "France-Dimanche". He was still a friend at the time of his death of Claude Lanzmann who worked with him at that newspaper.

He was working as a journalist when he was inspired by the success of Ian Fleming's James Bond series to write his first novel, "SAS in Istanbul", in 1965. He went on to publish an average of four SAS novels every year, writing them on an old typewriter.

He was known for cultivating a vast network of intelligence officials, diplomats, and journalists who fed him information that he used in his stories. His plots were sometimes eerily prophetic. One book included a plot to kill Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, a year before his actual assassination. Another book described a secret CIA command center in Benghazi, Libya; it was published a few months before such an outpost was actually revealed to exist.