Maigret author Georges Simenon and Frédéric Dard were friends. Will Dard now emulate his success?
He was a close friend of Georges Simenon, the author whose fictional detective, Jules Maigret, became a TV hit in 1960s Britain. But despite writing 300 crime thrillers and selling 200 million books in his native France, Frédéric Dard remains almost unknown in Britain. Not one of his novels is in print in English.
But all that is about to change. Sixteen years after Dard’s death, a British publisher is gambling on him being the next big thing in detective fiction. On 2 June, Pushkin Press will publish Bird in a Cage under its Vertigo crime imprint, the first in a planned series of Dard’s psychological “novels of the night”.
Daniel Seton, Pushkin’s commissioning editor, describes the books as “dark and disorientating”, and says they are written with the same literary flair as Simenon. According to Seton, French homes have “piles and piles of them next to the armchair in the living room. People tear through them. They devour them.”
Around 250 of Dard’s books were published, under at least 17 aliases, including Cornel Milk and L’Ange Noir (the Black Angel). Some of those penned under the name of his Paris police superintendent, San-Antonio – a kind of French James Bond – were translated in the 1960s and 70s, but are now all but forgotten in the UK.
The Guardian, 2016
Continue reading at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/14/frederic-dard-france-crime-novels-georges-simenon