The Gravediggers' Bread by Frédéric Dard

The Gravediggers' Bread - This Frédéric Dard hard-hitting crime noir reads like combination Jim Thompson nihilism and Émile Zola on speed. Many thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for making six Dard novels available in English. They are all terrific. I wish Pushkin would publish six more.

“You had to really love women, the way I did, to see that under her badly tailored garments this one had a waist like a napkin ring and admirable curves...”

So muses narrator/main character Blaise Delange, age thirty, when a woman emerges from a phone booth in a provincial French town where he came to seek a job as sales representative for a rubber factory. After Delange makes his call to a buddy in Paris to let him know somebody else already got the job, he finds a wallet with a wad of large bills. “Blaise, my boy,” I thought. “You've won the consolation prize.”

Delange desperately needs the cash since he has recently returned to France from two years in Casablanca where his business venture went bust...but he remembers that woman, slim, blonde with her large, melancholy blue eyes. “I haven't always been very honest in my life and scruples have never kept me awake when I've been tired; however, I believe I've always been a gentleman when it comes to ladies.”

Delange finds out the address of the wallet's owner, Germaine Castain, and returns her wallet. He also meets Germaine's grubby little husband, an undertaker, who just so happens to need someone to help out in sales and other related undertaker duties. Ah, thinks Delange, a job with guaranteed income and also (the big reason!) an opportunity to keep in contact with a woman whom he's just fallen in love. Blaise Delange's parting words, "We can always give it a try."

Dard sets the stage thusly for his unfolding drama, a story filled with unexpected twists and revelations right from the opening chapters, a story that, by any standard, receives top scores as an existential humdinger. And here you go, a batch of humdinger highlights -

One's Destiny – We're given a number of hints and signals Delange's ultimate fate might be, as they say, “in the cards” given he sees himself as a hard-luck loser (“I'm always last in the queue when they're giving things out”) and also his being a romantic at heart (“In the booth there lingered a curious scent which moved me in a strange way...and which almost made me feel like crying”). Yet there are times when Blaise Delange can surprise us. And speaking of surprises, there's that slim good-looker with her slightly too large melancholy eyes.

Paris vs. Provincial – Delange also sees himself as an urbane Parisian, a man most comfortable in the city. “Provincial life does nothing for me; quite the reverse, it drags me down.” And how about all the women and men living out in the hinterlands? As Delange tells Germaine point-blank, they're nothing but plebs, a handful of yokels. But, dear Blaise, might you be underestimating the intelligence and savvy of these yokels?

Bookish – Unlike his friend and fellow writer Georges Simenon, Frédéric Dard's protagonists usually are familiar with the world of books. At one point Delange likens what he sees to a scene from Zola and at another he tells us: “I went to bed as soon as dinner was out of the way and tried to read a book, but I must have started the first sentence fifteen times over without being able to take in th meaning of the characters on the page.” In this way, Dard's French readers could readily relate with the author's main man.

The Power of Popular Culture: “When he (Germaine's undertaker husband) came out of his room, dressed in a black uniform and cocked hat, I just burst out laughing. He looked like a Walt Disney character: he was exactly like a gnome in disguise.” Gravediggers' Bread originally published in 1956 and we can detect the beginnings of the profound influence American films would have on people around the globe.  This scene also speaks to the way Dard injects bits of dark humor.

Crime and Punishment Redux: It isn't exactly on the level of Raskolnikov and Inspector Porfiry Petrovich, but Frédéric Dard does have Delange play a cat and mouse game with a town detective - one of the more intriguing aspects of the tale.

Recall I mentioned Blaise Delange being a romantic at heart. How deep is his love for Germaine? Might even someone who views himself as a born loser be capable of what Joseph Campbell terms sacrifice and bliss? If you are even slightly intrigued by what I have written, time to treat yourself to The Gravediggers' Bread.


French master of crime fiction Frédéric Dard, 1921-2000