Walking to Brockley one morning last month, I found a whole stack of these things, piled outside somebody’s front gate next to the bins.
I would have snagged the lot, only I was with some new friends from Denmark who were staying with me at the time, and thought I’d best spare them that awkward feeling you get when you’ve arrived in a foreign country for a week and your host suddenly starts scooping armfuls of sleazy abandoned paperbacks off the pavement. I grabbed the top one off the pile and made a mental note to head back later and investigate, but alas, by that evening they’d all vanished.
Most of the books had far more salacious cover designs than this one, all featuring variations on the theme of sexy Muslim ladies with machine guns.
Not being a French speaker, I have no further clue what the hell this is all about (beyond the obvious), but it sure is nice to find the spirit of lurid girls n’ guns pulp cover design alive and well outside the English speaking world.
Astonishingly, the inside cover reveals that when this volume was published in 2008, there were no less than 170 books in this “SAS” series, all bearing the Gerard De Villiers name. So if I felt a vague twinge of unease just now using the phrase “sexy Muslim ladies with machine guns” on my blog, imagine the balls it must take for these guys to churn out books on the subject at the speed of something like ten a month, helpfully leaving the address of their Paris office on the opening page.
Actually though, googling up some more of these covers, I note that relatively few of them seem to go in for obvious Muslim/terrorist imagery; perhaps the cover photo on the one I’ve posted above is unusually restrained for precisely that reason..?
Thankfully, such issues of cultural sensitivity don’t seem to have stopped ‘Editions Gerard De Villiers’ from scouring the world in search of other instances of violent conflict that can be explored via the medium of sexy ladies with machine guns;
Man, I *love* that “Furie a Belfast” cover. Is she supposed to be a swinging, catsuit-clad Catholic nun-assassin or something? What wonderful, ridiculous stuff.
3 comments:
These make me think of pulp covers from yesteryear. Definitely some great stuff. It reminds me of when one of the major publishing houses reprinted all of the old Ellery Queen novels with a snazzy sexy mini skirted woman, even though not a single girl would have looked a bit like the cover models.
180 books?!? That's steady work for the cover photographer.
I never knew these kind of things even existed. Isn't it weird that the past 3 blogs I read about were either about the opposite sex or sex itself. Jesus I feel like a dirt bag.
cool blog, i think i would have had to also fight the temptation of grabbing all those books too! i would have been a hard choice.
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