"L'Islam est paradoxalement l'ennemi à la fois du vieil Occident Chrétien, et celui de la société multicuturelle post-moderne, il nous déteste à la fois comme croisés et comme pédés."
American Black Box
maurice-g-dantec.png, 3,4kB
Maurice G Dantec

Biography

"One day or another, the man in me will have to be killed"

Maurice G. Dantec, in American Black Box

Maurice Georges Dantec was born in Grenoble, France, on the 13th of June 1959 , in a communist family. His father was a journalist specializing in science and his dressmaking mother was employed by the Town of Ivry-sur-Seine in Greater Paris. He spent most of his early childhood in this town, right in the middle of what was called the “red” suburb. When he was 5 years old, he became the prey of dramatic fits of asthma that were to arouse in him “excruciating and nerve-racking feelings of imminent death”.  The remembrances of such fits would haunt his teen years. Those health problems and his parents’ marriage falling apart led him to live with his mother and his sister in the French Alps, near Grenoble for five years.

After completing his school years successfully, he joined the Lycée Romain-Rolland (a French high-school) in 1971 where he met Jean-Bernard Pouy who would later found Le Poulpe (“The Octopus”), a peculiar detective-story literary movement imposing specific writing rules on the different writers who developed narrative plots for one and only main detective character nicknamed “the Octopus”. That increased his already strongly-anchored  liking for the then fringe American literatures (thrillers, psychedelic writing, science-fiction…). He very soon became a greedy reader of the philosophers Nietzsche and Deleuze. In the late seventies, after passing his baccalauréat (high-school diploma), he started literature studies at university which he rapidly gave up to create rock bands such as Etat d’Urgence (“State of Emergency”) and Artefact. During the 1980s, he continued with his musical experiences while working as a designer and copywriter in advertising.


After he started up an unsuccessful multimedia communication agency in 1991, he decided to “start writing seriously” while working in a telemarketing agency. In 1992 Jean-Bernard Pouy advised him to send Patrick Raynal, the then head of the famous French Série Noire detective story collection, “a thick and unpublishable manuscript of five hundred pages containing two thousand characters each”. The publisher, who foresaw “his potential as a literary freak”, strongly encouraged him to hand him out another piece of work.