Didier Daeninckx was born in 1949 in Saint-Denis. He was schooled in Aubervilliers and before obtaining his high school leaving certificate, went to work for a printer and then became a cultural events organizer. Having become a bookworm at age thirteen, he wanted to make a career of writing and started working as a freelance journalist for municipal and departmental publications. During a period of unemployment, he started work on his debut novel Mort au premier tour, published five years later. He published his second novel Meurtres pour mémoire at the end of a seven-year long dry period of reflection. He seemed to have found his true voice as this was followed by thirty more novels in short order. His novels show his wish of integrating a touch of social and political reality into his noir plots.
He continued however at the same time to write for the young public. He has published several comics and texts in the Syros-Souris Noire, Flammarion and Page Blanche collections at Gallimard. And he has written several short stories, and screenplays for radio and television.
He contributes to the website Amnistia.net, an online daily, which publishes news and investigative reports. He draws his inspiration form current events and daily life. He is recognized as a major literary figure in the politicaly committed noir genre. Before he writes anything, he goes out into the field to feel the atmosphere, meet people, take pictures and notes. There is always a strong connection with reality in his writings. He defines the noir genre as being the literature of suffering cities and bodies. In 1994, he was awarded the Prix Paul Féval for popular literature by the Société des gens de lettres for all his writings.
Bibliography
- Camarades de classe (Gallimard, 2008)
- Les baraques du globe (Terre de Brume, 2008)
- Levée d’écrou (Imbroglio, 2007)
- Histoire et faux-semblants (Verdier, 2007)
- Hors limites (Pocket, 2006)
- On achève bien les disc-jockeys (Editions La Branche, 2006)
- Itinéraire d’un salaud ordinaire (Gallimard, 2006)
- Le retour d’Ataï (suite de Cannibales) (Gallimard, 2006)
- Le dernier guérillero (Gallimard, 2005)
- Boucs émissaires (Les 400 coups, 2005)
- Main courante et autres lieux (Gallimard, 2005)
- Villes noires : nouvelles (J’ai Lu, 2005)
- Les sorciers de la Bessède et autres nouvelles noires (J’ai Lu, 2005)
- La route du Rom : une enquête de Gabriel Lecouvreur, dit le Poulpe (Gallimard, 2005)
- Nouvelles policières (tome 2) : noire série (Flammarion, 2005)
- Le poulpe : nazis dans le métro (J’ai Lu, 2005)
- Cités perdues (Verdier, 2005)
- Il faut savoir désobéir (Rue du Monde, 2003 - avec l’illustrateur Pef )
Synopsis of Camarades de classe
Dominique, the narrator is a succesful advertiser nearing sixty, like her husband François. He is a manager for a pharmaceutical concern undergoing a reorganisation and agonizes over the possibility of losing his job only a couple of years before he is due to retire. One day, a former classmate leaves a message for him on “find-your-former-classmates.com”. It is Dominique however who answers passing herself off as her husband and she tries to draw secrets from her husband’s past out of the classmate.
Through the ensuing email correspondence, the reader will discover contradictory perceptions of the past. The kids from Aubervilliers who were in the same class in 1964 were marked by the rebellions of May 1968 and communist culture. One of them has become a crooner, one has remained a fervent Stalinist, another one has become a generous swindler, some are chemists, or exiled academics, private detectives, homeless people or dead.
The class picture which leads to the electronic reunion of the former classmates presents an enigma however. In returning to the red suburbs in the still triumphant period of communism, Didier Daeninckx tells the story, in his inimitably precise and generous style, of a generation marked by the upheavals of the sixties and seventies.
Synopsis of Les baraques du globe
Starting in the twenties, the suburbs of Paris were literally covered in precarious housing. Unbuilt lots, orchards and gardens were replaced with proletarian housing. Ferdinand, Didier Daeninckx’s grandfather purchased a lot from a piece of land belonging to Émile Grindel, Paul Éluard’s father. The fates of many characters will criss-cross there, Marie, Jojo, Fernand, Cosette, André and Jean-Lou. Didier Collobert adds his own graphic memories of other housing, especially the huts erected in Lorient after the 1945 bombings, to this autobiographical text. The characters are strangely integrated into the drawings of the bygone wooden and steel quarters of the Breton city.
s of the Breton city.