«Faut être logique» (“Let’s be logical”), by San-Antonio (Frédéric Dard). A ghost story.

The late San-Antonio (pen name of Frédéric Dard) was one of the most prolific french authors. His Commissaire San-Antonio was the french version of James Bond, only with more sex, more laughs and more books (he wrote nearly 200 of them). Unlike Bond, however, he had also several faithful sidekicks, Bérurier, an obese glutton and Pinaud, a frail, nearly senile old-school detective who are in nearly every story.

The stories were either plain detective stories, but also James-Bondesque spy stories, and many of them had Da Vinci Code like twists to them (when I read the Da Vinci Code, I thought “meh, it’s like a San-Antonio” — and there are dozens of Da Vinci Code like San-Antonios…)…

San-Antonio’s language was… special, a mix of old slang and totally hilarious made-up expressions to denote the sex acts that occured on nearly every page… And the character names, especially when foreign, when pronounced with a french pronunciation either had hilarious or sexual connotation (like the british inspector Mac Heckett, which means «ma quéquette» = “my dick” — which is kinda appropriate for a dectective).

Now, when I was 10, I was reading Lovecraft, and I wasn’t particularly spooked. However, it was at about age 30 that I read «Faut être logique», and I have never had been scared by a book like that.

The story is about a haunted house. Okay, I read Lovecraft as a kid, but I knew it was horror/fantasy. However, I had read nearly 40 San-Antonios beforehand, and I knew that no matter how crazy or outlandish the story, there was ALWAYS a logical explanation.

So when San-Antonio started writing about a haunted house, there had to be a logical explanation, and indeed logical and plausible it was. But absolutely horrific! I still shudder thinking about it 20 years after reading the story.

French farmhouses are most always adjacent to the barn; often, you will have 4-5 buildings linked together around a courtyard and you can go from one to the other without going outside.

The farm here had a silo lodged between the house and barn portion. 11 years prior to the action in the story, a man has been bludgeoned apparently to death, and then walled-in in a cavity between a bathroom and the grain silo. Then, every so often, unexplainable howls were heard, which made the house “haunted”.

It was the man who was trapped in the wall cavity, who wasn’t dead, but very much alive. He was able to survive for 11 years by eating some grain leaking from the silo, and drinking water from a leaky pipe.

Can you fathom the absolute horror at being walled-in the dark for 11 years???