
北方妇女儿童出版社, 1988 (Frédéric Dard, Mausolée pour une garce, originally published as Les Derniers mystères de Paris, Fleuve Noir, 1958)
With thanks to Didier Poiret, Thierry Gautier & Yue Ma,
北方妇女儿童出版社, 1988 (Frédéric Dard, Mausolée pour une garce, originally published as Les Derniers mystères de Paris, Fleuve Noir, 1958)
With thanks to Didier Poiret, Thierry Gautier & Yue Ma,
Jean Carzou, L’Apocalypse, 1959
The best-selling San-Antonio series (1949-2000), with millions of copies sold over the course of five decades, represents one of the most enduring and successful legacies of Noir literature in France Continue reading
Jean Carzou (1907-2000), Les Caténaires, 1967
In a short passage which appears at first glance to encapsulate his populist views on art, bestselling French crime author San-Antonio likens the British Museum, which he professed to hate (“that most abhorrent place on earth, the most sinister ! A quintessential cemetery!”) to the Paris train station Saint-Lazare “with its smell of coal, pee and sweat”. While, according to him, in the Museum’s “cold light, the work of men becomes inhuman”, Saint-Lazare station, “full of cries and kisses” reminds him, “with its black beams that crisscross in the smoke” of “a drawing by Carzou” (San-Antonio, Y’a de l’action, Paris, Fleuve Noir, 1967; see the original French below). Continue reading
Bernard Buffet (1928-1999), Buildings en banlieue, 1970
San-Antonio, France’s most popular author of crime fiction of the past 50 years, was fascinated with the bleakness of the Parisian suburbs, where he moved to in 1949. His prolific oeuvre documents this morbid fascination, somewhere between horror and nostalgia. His novels are full of notations and recurring observations about the suburban tragic as the author experienced it. Suspending the investigation he his conducting, the first person narrator, Commissaire San-Antonio turns his attention momentarily to the representation of the surrounding space, the banlieues which were then rapidly sprawling around Paris. Continue reading