San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes (1955)

Bernard Tonacci is quite a man, or bloke, or chap, or guy, or mec or any other expression you care to use for a member of the human race with a dick. And Tonacci not only uses his cock, or prick, or schlong, or dick frequently but is one, meaning he's a detective, or private eye, or tec, that is. Of interest (to me at least) is not the the casual display of female breasts (with glimpses of nipples) on the cover, nor the mistaken identity in the cop-versus-gangland or the violence and murders in the story. Nor even the suspense, which is great. Nor even the fact that Bernard Tonacci, a Corsican, is in fact the detective San-Antonio, who doesn't exist in 'real life', but whose namesake has come to be the pseudonym of the real writer of this book: Frédéric Dard, who wrote 175 San-Antonio novels, and more than 300 books all told.

No, that's not my main interest: it's the language. A little of this is in verlan (or backslang), but a huge amount in slang in general. This is a world in which a door is une lourde, to open it is délourder, a cigarette is une clope or un pétard, a car is not just une bagnole but une tire, a taxi un bahut, a bottle une boutanche, an umbrella une pébroque, a hand une paluche, a shirt une limace, a hat un bitos or un bada, shoes are des lattes, and there are a number of argotic expressions either rarely used or in currency today. It's a feast for language lovers, just forget the hackneyed plot.

My Frédéric Dard posts:
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Joséphine Dard: Frédéric Dard, mon père: San-Antonio
Jean Durieux: Frédéric Dard dit San-Antonio
San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve
San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes
San-Antonio: Des dragées sans baptême