Dard’s ‘Coma’ in Persian

Another detective novel ‘Coma,’ in the ‘mask’ series translated by Abbas Agahi, the prolific translator of French works, is now available in Persian.

The Persian edition the 1965 noir suspense fiction by French thriller writer Frederic Dard (1921-2000), has been brought out by the publishing house Jahan-e-Ketab institute of art and culture, based in Tehran, Mehr News Agency reported.

The 168-page book is the 69th in the ‘Neqab’ (mask) series on detective stories published by the institute. Only recently, Agahi, 77, had contributed another volume ‘The Flemish House,’ a 1932 chilling novel by Belgian writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989), and based on the writer’s fictional character detective Jules Maigret.

In Coma, Jean, a young scriptwriter is traveling from France to Germany by train. He plans to stay in Hamburg for a while, to be inspired by the post-war atmosphere of the city and write a script.

On the train, he falls in love with a young woman from Hamburg. But very soon, he accidentally falls out of the train and is badly hurt. He finds the events that follow “as a number of exciting motifs for the plot of a new script.”

One of France’s most popular post-war writers also happened to be one of its most prolific. Dard wrote at least 284 thrillers, selling in excess of 200 million copies in France alone, according to The National (thenational.ae).

He wrote under 17 different pen names, and in one produced his most famous character, San-Antonio, a kind of French James Bond, whose adventures captivated French readers from 1949 to 2001.