Hubert Védrine said that while Foreign Minister, before visiting a country he read SAS novels to learn what French intelligence believed about it.
A Lebanese intelligence officer who wanted to reveal information but did not trust journalists (including Worth) helped de Villiers, the novelist said. Worth, former Beirut bureau chief for The New York Times, was amazed to read in La Liste Hariri details of the assassination of Rafic Hariri that no journalist knew when the book appeared. The books often predicted future events such as the capture of Carlos the Jackal, assassination of Anwar Sadat, and events in the Syrian Civil War. Government officials and intelligence officers, who enjoyed seeing themselves fictionalized and reading about events they could not publicly reveal, told de Villiers secrets that appeared in SAS, making the series' plots and settings unusually realistic. It may be the longest book series in history written by one person. He succeeded as of January 2013 the series had sold about 100 million copies worldwide, comparable to the Bond series. He began writing the SAS novels in 1964, when an editor told him that Ian Fleming had died and that de Villiers might create the next James Bond. Gérard de Villiers was a correspondent for France-Soir and other newspapers. The publisher released three other books in English through 2016. In 2014, Vintage Books posthumously published English versions of The Madmen of Benghazi and Chaos in Kabul, translated and adapted by William Rodarmor. The novel's title is a play on initials: Son Altesse Sérénissime (SAS) is the French version of "His Serene Highness" (HSH) and the British Special Air Service (SAS) is the principal special forces unit of the British Army.
Villiers's books have been bestsellers, making him a very wealthy man. Since 2006, the novels have been published as comic books, though aimed chiefly at adults given their contents of violence and sex. Son Altesse Sérénissime (His Serene Highness) is a series of espionage novels created by French author Gérard de Villiers, featuring Austrian prince Malko Linge as the lead character.
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