Frédéric Dard

Frédéric Charles Antoine Dard (29 June 1921, in Bourgoin-Jallieu, Isère, France – 6 June 2000, in Bonnefontaine, Fribourg, Switzerland) also known under the pen name San-Antonio, was a French writer. Known as an author of crime fiction and as a humorist, he was noted for his ability to blend the two genres. Though Dard also wrote serious fiction, his most successful books used a farcical tone.

During his lifetime, Dard was the best-selling French-language author in the World. He wrote more than four hundred novels, including the San-Antonio book series, dozens of plays and several screenplays, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. Dard used San-Antonio both as his most famous pen name and as the name of the titular hero of his main series. The San-Antonio books eventually became so popular that Dard started using that pen name also for books that did not belong to the series.

Dard was best known for his raunchy humor and his inventive use of the French language, notably French slang.

Frédéric Dard was born to a working-class family: his father was a metalworker and his mother was employed in a bakery. He first grew up in Saint-Chef before settling in Lyon, where he was mostly raised by his grandmother as his parents faced financial difficulties and his father struggled with alcoholism. Dard was born with a malformed shoulder and a disabled left arm, which caused him to endure exclusion and bullying as a child. Dard's disability remained a lifelong source of discomfort for him and he made constant efforts to hide it.

Dard started writing stories during his childhood, with the encouragement of his grandmother. While in high school, he began an apprenticeship in commerce but had little interest in his studies and took refuge in reading. He showed a preference for genre fiction, notably the hardboiled American-style crime novels of British authors Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase. His first published work was a short story titled Le Monocle révélateur (The Tell-Tale Monocle) that appeared in a children's magazine during his adolescence.