21 Star Wars legends who are also accomplished authors

6. Billy Dee Williams

Best known to Star Wars fans as the smooth-talking, cape-wearing scoundrel, Lando Calrissian, Billy Dee Williams has collaborated on several novels across various genres including mystery, romance, science fiction, and suspense.

Billy Dee’s first collaboration was with Edgar Award winner Rob MacGregor on the futuristic psychic-suspense novels, Psi/Net (1999) and its sequel Just/In Time (2000). The novel’s African-American protagonist, Trent Calloway, is a former Air Force Major who was part of a special elite group of spies with psychic abilities. Calloway uses his extra-sensory gifts to spy on both global and national threats for the U. S. government.

Williams also collaborated on a romantic-thriller novel called Twilight (2003), that he co-wrote with bestselling author, Elizabeth Atkins Bowman. The novel’s main protagonist is a judge named Simone Thompson that specializes in child-welfare cases. In the novel, she is stalked by a serial killer known as Narcissus who not only has his sights set on her but several high-profile actors as well.

Her love interest in the novel is an actor named D. Anthony Whitaker a.k.a “Sweet Sonny”, but their relationship is complicated by her having to preside over his custody hearing for his two twin daughters. As you might expect this leads to conflict on both sides, both emotionally and physically. How does it end? Well, let me tell– [{LOBOT}//_override ] the end. Dang Lobot. Oh well, guess you’ll have to buy it.

Bonus fact # 1: Project Stargate was the name of a real program that used psychics for “remote viewing” or spying, both for intelligence and military services. The report issued by the CIA on Nov.12, 1995, about this formerly classified program was the basis for the Psi/Net novel and its sequel Just/In Time.

Bonus fact # 2: The multi-talented Billy Dee Williams isn’t just an accomplished actor and author but a painter as well, having his work exhibited in galleries around the world.