Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what remains of them? In his monthly series Should we reread…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. And admirers, Frédéric Charles Antoine Dard (1921-2000) had millions. However, the majority of them were unaware of this name, falling especially for his most famous character, San-Antonio, a police commissioner with a sharp tongue and a pseudonym that would enrich its creator to the point of overshadowing him.
Frédéric Dard had several pseudonyms (Max Beeting, Wel Norton, Frédéric Charles, etc.), reserving his name for books that he believed would appeal to the Goncourt jury or open the doors of the Académie française to him — in both cases, a wasted effort. As for San-Antonio, the author of 175 novels written between 1949 and 1999 (not counting the special editions and those written by his son, Patrice Dard, after his father’s death), it is said that Frédéric Dard had simply blindly placed his finger on a map of the United States. Indeed, to write detective novels in France in the 1940s and 1950s, an American-sounding name was preferable. He had to point his finger at a city in Texas, but especially at a former Spanish mission. It was a good thing he didn’t end up in Paris…
The man who claimed not to write for readers but for friends had many, particularly in France and throughout the French-speaking world. Print runs of several thousand copies of a San-Antonio were not so rare, because his friends were fond of the (unbelievable) adventures of this European Humphrey Bogart, surrounded by characters who were just as colorful and colorful, including his assistants Bérurier and Pinaud, as well as his mother, Félicie.
Frédéric Dard said that having been born above a post office, he could not be anything other than a man of letters. While his family was pressuring him to become an accountant, the Second World War allowed him to frequent the best Parisian journalists, several of whom had taken refuge in Lyon, where his family lived. He took his first professional steps at Month in Lyoneven if he had a hard time imagining himself in the shoes of a reporter.
After a first novel marked by the San-Antonio seal, Settle his account! (1949), its commercial failure seemed to tell him to avoid the detective genre. But Armand de Caro, at the time founder of a brand new publishing house, Fleuve noir, urged him to write a second one for him. Ditch the girl (1950) confirms the intuition of the man who would become his publisher, and later his father-in-law. Frédéric Dard holds in San-Antonio a lucrative, permissive, fanciful, insolent double; many have nicknamed him the Rabelais of the 20th centurye century.
The investigations of Commissioner Antoine San-Antonio would not resemble those of Maigret or those of Hercule Poirot: logic and realism were rarely present. On the other hand, in the descriptions as in the dialogues, truculence took precedence over decorum. At a frenetic pace – he sometimes wrote up to six novels in a single year -, Frédéric Dard fiddled with grammar and vocabulary as much as bourgeois morality.
The laughter of despair
Born with an atrophied left arm, which made him the target of mockery in the schoolyard, Frédéric Dard quickly took refuge in the world of literature, a voracious reader nourished by a curious grandmother, and that of imagination, an excellent storyteller to mask his difference. “At 12, he was already reading Stendhal and Dostoyevsky,” says Éric Bouhier, author of San Antonio’s Love Dictionary (Plon), writer but also doctor, familiar with his work since adolescence.
Éric Bouhier is one of his most fervent admirers, as evidenced by his dictionary peppered with quotes from San-Antonio, and numerous contextualizations. For about six months, he reread everything before undertaking the writing of this work, an erudition that gave him the impression that “Frédéric Dard was in [son] back”! This literary reunion only confirmed what he already knew. “Reading everything in chronological order, it is the history of France in the second half of the 20th centurye century that passes, because he was a keen observer of our society. Yes, we laugh a lot, but there are many other things behind this laughter. In fact, he speaks about me, about all of us, about the human condition.
All this was displayed with humour, but if Frédéric Dard went through his life with a feeling of suffocation (this commissioner was both a source of wealth and a burden), a certain fatalism (he tried to end his days in 1965 after an acrimonious divorce) and many wounds to his pride (Louis-Ferdinand Céline was for him the literary ideal to conquer). And that’s without counting other personal dramas, including, in 1983, the kidnapping of his daughter, Joséphine, then aged 13, by kidnappers demanding a lot of money from the famous father. This episode is also mentioned in a novel written the same year, Should we kill little boys who have their hands on their hips?
Unlike Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, or Patricia Highsmith, he did not have a great fortune in cinema, although he was a playwright, adapter and screenwriter. His favorite character, unlike a Hercule Poirot, displayed an insolent and libidinous side. Jean-Sébastien Marsan, editor and essayist (Popular history of love in QuebecSand freeing through de-consumption), a great admirer of San-Antonio since adolescence (“I often heard my parents laugh out loud while reading it, so it intrigued me”), goes on to explain. “Frédéric Dard’s writing is colorful, the descriptions very precise, but the plots, often funny, are sometimes boring, quite convoluted, especially in the books from the 1980s and 1990s, where you can feel the assembly line work.”
In fact, what makes the author’s true strength is not necessarily transposable to cinema according to the former journalist. “We read San-Antonio for the metaphors, the wordplay, the puns, a language that belongs only to him.” According to many, this singularity is also found in his frank, and sometimes even brutal, way of exploring the sexuality of his characters, including that of the commissioner (in Move along, there’s nothing to seehe has sex with a widow just a stone’s throw from the still warm corpse of his husband…). Yes, Dard often aimed correctly, but also shot at anything that moved, had his scapegoats (including Maurice Druon, the author of Cursed Kings), and has never ceased to directly challenge his readers. Including in a multitude of wacky footnotes, one of his specialties.
The man who didn’t like women?
Criticism constantly returns to Frédéric Dard as well as to his alter ego San-Antonio: the author of The old woman who walked in the sea often drowned in an ocean of misogynistic remarks. A criticism that Katherine Goyette, alias Makina, teacher and children’s author (Lilo’s Lives, Nature class). She owes her discovery of San-Antonio to her father, as does her passion for literature. After reading dozens of books featuring the commissioner, she has no desire to pillory him. “On the one hand, you can’t fight misogyny if you never talk about it. On the other hand, you don’t change a society by multiplying taboos. Humor is an excellent weapon of combat, literature is the place for all imperfect characters and, in San-Antonio, misogyny is so enormous that it becomes absurd.” And if we readily compare San-Antonio to James Bond or Bob Morane, Katherine Goyette believes instead that we should look at OSS 117, “but with a little more intelligence”!
“Someone once said that there are only two printed documents in French literature that are not sexist: the telephone directory and the IKEA catalogue,” recalls Jean-Sébastien Marsan. “When Frédéric Dard talks about sexuality or the pleasures of the table, it is almost always delusional.” And behind these delusions was a tireless worker glued to his typewriter. “He never stopped expressing his love of man and his fear of humanity,” summarizes Éric Bouhier about the man who is said to have invented nearly 10,000 words.