The French detective writer Frederic Dard, who died on June 8th aged 78, was a prolific novelist, whose work was compared to that of Georges Simenon and who was acclaimed as a "magician" with language. The French president, Jacques Chirac, described him as "an immensely generous writer".
He produced over 300 books, more than half of them based around the partnership of two police officers, Superintendent San Antonio and his sidekick Inspector Berurier.
Known as the "San Antonio" books - he reportedly chose his hero's name by simply going through lists of cities on a map of the US - they had sold a phenomenal 27 million copies by the time of the author's death.
Frederic Dard was born in Bourgoin-Jallieu, in the Isere region of France, the son of an artisan, turned businessman. He was brought up by his grandmother while his parents were busy with their central heating company.
It was his grandmother, he said later, who first gave him a love of literature by encouraging him to read. Of all his childhood memories, his most vivid was the sight of the family possessions being seized when his father's business collapsed in the 1930s.
The family were forced to move to Lyon, where the best future for the young Frederic seemed to be working as a clerk.
Instead, his uncle, who worked in a garage, managed to put him in touch with a local magazine, Le Mois de Lyon. Here, as a young journalist writing about Lyon's city street life, he discovered a new world of brothels, pimps and criminals - and the work of "les flics" (the police).
He published his first novel in 1940, at the age of only 19. Several books later, he was encouraged by Georges Simenon to try and adapt one of them for the theatre.
In 1950, convinced that this was where his future lay, he moved to Paris with his wife Odette, whom he had married in 1942, and their two children.
But the theatre was not the immediate answer to his problems. As a struggling writer trying to support a young family, he needed money, and, in desperation, went back to writing novels. He was encouraged by Armand de Caro, a new young publisher he had met, and, with his main detective character San Antonio - himself a criminal by nature - already formed in his mind, he looked back to his childhood to find his hero's assistant. Inspector Berurier was based on a neighbour haunted by the first World War.
He worked at an extraordinary rate, producing up to five novels a year - while still holding on to the possibilities of cinema and television productions. He was constantly being interviewed, and despite their newfound wealth, he and Odette experienced marital difficulties. In 1965, he attempted suicide by hanging himself. He and Odette finally split up, and in 1969 he married de Caro's daughter Francoise.
By the 1960s, the academic world had become particularly infatuated by his use of language. Whole seminars were given over to the San Antonio books, and the way that he combined words; for sleet, which consists of rain-pluie and snow-neige, he would write of the weather, "il pleige"; on other occasions, he would invent entirely new French words, such as adultatre. It is little wonder that there were those who thought he should be elected to the Academie Francaise. But he was not impressed, just as he remained unaffected by the admiration of French politicians.
Outside the detective genre, he Dard wrote many novels using a pseudonym. These ranged from Frederic Charles to Kaput and L'Ange Noir.
(The Black Angel). In 1983, Josephine, his daughter with Francoise, was kidnapped while the family were living in Switzerland. Although, after her release, the novelist said it was the most traumatic moment of his life, he later used the idea of the kidnapping in one of his books. He would also often invent imaginary moments in French history and, although he said he feared death, his one regret was that he would not be able to use it in one of his own books.
Frederic Dard is survived by his second wife, Francoise, and three children, two of them from his marriage to Odette.
Frederic Charles Antoine Dard: born 1921; died, June 2000