French novelist Georges-Jean Arnaud, author of more than 400 titles including the gigantic science fiction saga The ice cream company, died Sunday at the age of 91, learned AFP Wednesday from its publisher.
“He died on Sunday. It is a great loss for popular French literature, not only for SF but also for his police, his spy novels and great novels,” Nathalie Carpentier told AFP, founder and director of French Pulp editions.
Popular and prolific writer, G.J. Arnaud has tried his hand at all genres. Science fiction but also the black novel, spy, adventure or erotic. In total, he will have written some 416 novels.
Many literary prizes
Born in July 1928, G.J. Arnaud has published his hundreds of books under more than a dozen pseudonyms (Saint-Gilles, Gil Darcy, Frédéric Mado, Gino Arnoldi, Ugo Solenza …).
Published under the name of Saint-Gilles (the name of his native village in the Gard), his first novel, Don’t shoot the inspector, won the Quai des Orfèvres prize in 1952. He won many other literary prizes including, in 1988, the RTL general public prize for The cloud mills.
Prolific author
A glance at his abundant bibliography gives a summary of what was long regarded with disdain as “station romance”. The titles are already promises of adventure: Baroud at Tibesti, A charter for hell, Sweaty death…
Writing faster than his shadow, he wrote up to 27 novels in the space of a single year. But, “on average I wrote about fifteen books a year,” he said in 2011 to Figaro.
His monumental work will remain The Ice Cream Company which has a total of 98 volumes. Millions of copies of the episodes of this saga depicting a world that fell back into an ice age after an ecological disaster have passed. And have inspired adaptations notably to television, comics and video games.
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