The French detective writer Frédéric Dard, who has died of a heart attack aged 78, was a prolific novelist, whose work was compared to that of Georges Simenon and who was acclaimed as a "magician" ...

The French have a certain way with crime. Famously, during the postwar years, French authors and auteurs took the hard-boiled style of Americans like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond ...

“Nightmares are personal things,” thinks the trapped narrator of “Bird in a Cage” as it dawns on him that fate’s door has clanged shut. “You can experience them, that’s all you can do.” In fewer than ...