Frédéric Dard
Frédéric Dard (Frédéric Charles Antoine Dard; 29 June 1921, in Bourgoin-Jallieu, Isère, France – 6 June 2000, in Bonnefontaine, Fribourg, Switzerland) was a French crime writer. He wrote more than three hundred novels, plays and screenplays, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms, including the "San-Antonio" book series. Biography. Frédéric Dard wrote 175 adventures of San-Antonio, of which millions of copies were sold. Detective Superintendent Antoine San-Antonio is a kind of French James Bond without gadgets, flanked by two colleagues, the old, sickly but wise inspector César Pinaud and the gargantuesque inspector Alexandre -Benoît Bérurier. He is a member of the French secret service and has to fulfill impossible missions given by "Le Vieux" ("the Old Man"), later known as "Achilles", the head of the French police. With the help of his colleagues he always succeeds through various adventures. Dard won the 1957 Grand prix de littérature policière for "The Executioner Weeps". Bibliography. San-Antonio adventures have been translated into different languages, such as Italian, Romanian and Russian. A few have been translated into English: Apart from San-Antonio, Dard wrote number under various other pseudonyms, including Frederic Antony, Verne Goody, William Blessings , Cornel Milk, Frederic Charles and L'Ange Noir. Pushkin Press published a number of Dard novels written under his own name in the 1950s-1960s: Further reading. There is no monograph on San-Antonio or Frédéric Dard in English.