Frédéric Dard/San-Antonio in Bourgoin-Jallieu (Isère (38))

75 rue de la Liberation, where Frédéric Dard was born.

And, shut up at the time of our visit, the San Antonio café close to the house of Dard's birth, which opened in Dard's lifetime.

And finally the wonderful (and wonderfully named) sculpture Objet Dard (2003) by Bertrand Lavier, which is in the centre of town at the end of avenue Frédéric Dard. On the monument the 175 San Antonio books by Dard are named.

Frédéric Dard/San-Antonio in Saint-Chef (Isère (38))

Frédéric Dard (1921-2000), the writer of many gloriously far-fetched policiers crammed full of slang (some words invented by Dard himself) spent part of his childhood in Saint-Chef in the département of Isère, a place near to his heart and where he is buried. He was also known as San-Antonio after the cop he created.

The school where Dard was a pupil is now private premises, but this plaque remembers him today in what is now Place Frédéric Dard.

A part of the village museum is also dedicated to the writer.

'FRÉDÉRIC DARD

DIT SAN-ANTONIO

1921 - 2000'

Joséphine Dard: Frédéric Dard, mon père: San-Antonio (2010)

Joséphine Dard is Frédéric Dard's only biological child by his second wife Françoise, and this book is a huge love letter to her father on the tenth anniversary of his death. In 'coffee table' style this publication may be, but it is very revealing of the enigmatic, crazy, but so sane antidote that Frédéric Dard was to the world of literature, to the world in general.

Here, we have letters written to Frédéric Dard – the man known to most people as San-Antonio after his eponymous larger-than-life private detective – and many tributes and many letters by (mainly, but not exclusively) figures involved in the world of literature and the arts such as Bernard Pivot, Georges Simenon, Frédéric Beigbeder, Albert Cohen, Georges Trenet, Patrick Sebastien, Jean Dutourd, the list is huge.

Frédéric Dard was a highly gifted, highly original and very funny writer whose work will continue to inspire many other writers. He was also a very loving father, husband and very warm to his many friends, very giving. But this book seems to tease out more than Jean Durieux's book on him did. Here, and by more than one person, we learn of his hypersensitivity, shyness even, and Joséphine Dard reveals that on her first marriage he walked her to the church but no further as on that day his arms were covered in psoriasis. For me, the most revealing part in this book is in three pages he wrote about himself, which I find quite devastating.

The paper is called 'Si j'étais...Frédéric Dard' ('If I were...Frédéric Dard') and is astonishingly frank, even though he didn't (I'm sure) intend to publish it. Here we have the existential Dard, reflecting on what he, er, isn't. He writes that he always expected to be himself, that his self (Frédéric Dard) would somehow magic itself into being when he grew up, like at a particular age when he was allowed to vote. But it didn't happen, he still feels deprived of himself, is still waiting for something to happen, as if he's missed an appointment. There's a kind of parallax (my expression), a lack of correspondence between how others see him and how he sees himself. Everything he says, does and thinks doesn't conform to his 'true [or real] essence'. This seems even bleaker than Samuel Beckett.

An extremely interesting book.

One small correction: the author says that her father invited Renaud on Le Grand Échequier, in 1982, when his career was just starting: wrong, Renaud already had five successful albums to his credit by then. He went on to much greater success, but that's hardly the same thing.

My Frédéric Dard posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Joséphine Dard: Frédéric Dard, mon père: San-Antonio
Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio
San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve
San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes
San-Antonio: Des dragées sans baptême

Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio (1990)

This is, in effect, an autobiography / biography of Frédéric Dard/San-Antonio, who wrote perhaps 288  books, mostly as San-Antonio but also under many other pseudonyms. Jean Durieux tries his best to track down this great figure of French literature, interviewing him in Switzerland and Cannes, for instance, and at times it's initially difficult to figure out who's speaking, such is the resemblance between the slang of the two people. Anyway, in San-Antonio's books it's sometimes difficult to know whether San-Antonio or Frédéric Dard is speaking.

Most of this is culled from tape recordings of what Dard said to Durieux, and much of it is rambling slang. At times it's difficult to believe, as Durieux points out to him, and the bragging seems to be never-ending. But it's clear that we have a man from relatively humble beginnings, born in Bourgoin-Jussieu, who spent a part of his childhood in Saint-Chef (both in Isère), moving to Lyon where the writer Marcel Granger (born in Lons-le-Saunier) sets him on as a young writer for his paper Le Mois â Lyon.

It takes a few years before Dard's books take off, but Armand de Caro encourages his writing San-Antonio books, and he goes to Paris and has a family with Odette and sells many thousands of books and of course becomes rich. There's a great deal of name-dropping, and such people as Édith Piaf and Johnny Hallyday (spelt as Halliday) are just thrown out as a matter of course.

Then there's the failed suicide when Dard is torn between his wife and family with Odette and his new love Françoise de Caro, his publisher's wife. Eventually, he marries Françoise and they end up living in Switzerland with Fabrice (his wife's son by her first husband), Abdel (an African child they adopt), and their own child Joséphine.

And it's the kidnapping of Joséphine and its effects on Dard and his family that occupies more than 100 of the 346 pages in this book, which goes into the precise details of how it was accomplished, the extraordinary lengths the kidnapper went to, and details of his former thefts. 

Gradually, a picture emerges of Dard's life, although it's not necessarily in complete chronological order – the reader has to do a little work – but Jean Durieux has obviously made the most of a very difficult (human) subject.

(Of all the people mentioned here, one unnamed guy runs a kind of utopian restaurant in Courcheval, with a sock to put any contributions for the food consumed hanging on the door. Dard doesn't mention his name, nor the restaurant's name, but says he used to write. A little Googling proved him to be Jean Bouvet, head of 'La Soucoupe' restaurant, and author, among other books, of Billebaude dans les Alpes.)

My Frédéric Dard posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Joséphine Dard: Frédéric Dard, mon père: San-Antonio
Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio
San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve
San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes

San-Antonio: Des dragées sans baptême

San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve (1975)

My second San-Antonio, and certainly not my last. Yes, of course San-Antonio (Frédéric Dard) churned out several books a year, of course they all have impossible plots, unbelievable sexual feats, and make the eponymous hero look superhuman.

This is the tale of an impotent, but theoretically conventionally married, actor who's insured his life for one particular day – the coming 2 June – for a huge sum and his unwitting insurance agent employs the private dick San-Antonio to look out for problems and look after the safety of Christian Bordeaux.

Obviously things go wrong, Bordeaux is almost attacked by a bomb under San-Antonio's own nose, a couple of potential murderers arrive on the scene, Bordeaux kills them, but is himself poisoned by someone changing his normal medication  for cyanide.

Or is it anything like as simple as that? It'll take a great deal of investigation on San-Antonio's part, including a visit to Bordeaux's wife's tropical island haven – in drag – and a trip to the US before things are sorted out, but then what do you expect?

This was written some twenty years after the first San-Antonio novel I read – Messieurs le hommes – and of course it is packed with imaginative slang expressions (many of Frédéric Dard's own invention), plus some (often self-mocking) footnotes and asides, the sex is a little more explicit, but what ever is the M.... instead of Merde doing there in 1975? Was he frightened of putting off his older readers? Most odd.

My Frédéric Dard posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Joséphine Dard: Frédéric Dard, mon père: San-Antonio
Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio
San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve
San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes
San-Antonio: Des dragées sans baptême

San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes (1955)

Bernard Tonacci is quite a man, or bloke, or chap, or guy, or mec or any other expression you care to use for a member of the human race with a dick. And Tonacci not only uses his cock, or prick, or schlong, or dick frequently but is one, meaning he's a detective, or private eye, or tec, that is. Of interest (to me at least) is not the the casual display of female breasts (with glimpses of nipples) on the cover, nor the mistaken identity in the cop-versus-gangland or the violence and murders in the story. Nor even the suspense, which is great. Nor even the fact that Bernard Tonacci, a Corsican, is in fact the detective San-Antonio, who doesn't exist in 'real life', but whose namesake has come to be the pseudonym of the real writer of this book: Frédéric Dard, who wrote 175 San-Antonio novels, and more than 300 books all told.

No, that's not my main interest: it's the language. A little of this is in verlan (or backslang), but a huge amount in slang in general. This is a world in which a door is une lourde, to open it is délourder, a cigarette is une clope or un pétard, a car is not just une bagnole but une tire, a taxi un bahut, a bottle une boutanche, an umbrella une pébroque, a hand une paluche, a shirt une limace, a hat un bitos or un bada, shoes are des lattes, and there are a number of argotic expressions either rarely used or in currency today. It's a feast for language lovers, just forget the hackneyed plot.

My Frédéric Dard posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Joséphine Dard: Frédéric Dard, mon père: San-Antonio
Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio
San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve
San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes
San-Antonio: Des dragées sans baptême