San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve (1975)

My second San-Antonio, and certainly not my last. Yes, of course San-Antonio (Frédéric Dard) churned out several books a year, of course they all have impossible plots, unbelievable sexual feats, and make the eponymous hero look superhuman.

This is the tale of an impotent, but theoretically conventionally married, actor who's insured his life for one particular day – the coming 2 June – for a huge sum and his unwitting insurance agent employs the private dick San-Antonio to look out for problems and look after the safety of Christian Bordeaux.

Obviously things go wrong, Bordeaux is almost attacked by a bomb under San-Antonio's own nose, a couple of potential murderers arrive on the scene, Bordeaux kills them, but is himself poisoned by someone changing his normal medication  for cyanide.

Or is it anything like as simple as that? It'll take a great deal of investigation on San-Antonio's part, including a visit to Bordeaux's wife's tropical island haven – in drag – and a trip to the US before things are sorted out, but then what do you expect?

This was written some twenty years after the first San-Antonio novel I read – Messieurs le hommes – and of course it is packed with imaginative slang expressions (many of Frédéric Dard's own invention), plus some (often self-mocking) footnotes and asides, the sex is a little more explicit, but what ever is the M.... instead of Merde doing there in 1975? Was he frightened of putting off his older readers? Most odd.

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