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.

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.

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