Sébastien Japrisot

Multi-talented writer, screenwriter and film director ? 'the Graham Greene of France'

Jean-Baptiste Rossi (Sébastien Japrisot), writer, screenwriter and film director: born Marseilles, France 4 July 1931; died Vichy, France 4 March 2003.

The novelist Prosper Mérimée said of the great historian Joseph-Arthur Gobineau: "He has the bump of comic observation." Sébastien Japrisot too was gifted with that bump, and he possessed several others – suspense, humour, and the twin bumps of grandeur and pity, vulgarity and elegance. Above all, he had the triple bump of novelist, screenwriter and film director. Yet he was the least "bumptious" of artists, rarely seeking the limelight and seemingly indifferent to the praise and the blame of critics, who in the end seldom bothered to review his books or his films seriously.

He claimed not to read the books of his contemporaries, which may partly explain why he was in later life so unjustly neglected. He preferred British authors: G.K. Chesterton was one of his favourites, and he claimed his only bedside books were Alice in Wonderland and Hemingway's Cinquante mille dollars (the 1928 French collection of "Fifty Grand" and other stories) – "all a writer needs to read in order to write well". Perhaps that was also why he never won the Prix Goncourt for literature: the selection committee was dominated by writers he detested, and he said so.

Yet he was always a popular novelist of distinction, with an instantly recognisable style and great story-telling techniques: he might be called the Graham Greene of France. Whenever one of his new books appeared, there was the usual debate among those sobersides the literary critics: "Is this literature or not literature? Is it mystery or crime or not?" The same arguments once raged round the work of his master Georges Simenon, whose complete works lined the walls of Japrisot's bedroom.

Japrisot was too bewilderingly multi-talented, a man who enjoyed writing and the art of making films: much of his work was filmed, and he wrote excellent screenplays for great directors such as Costa-Gavras and René Clément. In 1983, he won a César for the adaptation of his novel L'Eté meurtrier (One Deadly Summer), the fine film by Jean Becker, with Isabelle Adjani, Alain Souchon, Suzanne Flon, and Michel Galabru.

He was born Jean-Baptiste Rossi: anagram maniacs will soon spot the ingenuity of verbal play in the transformation of his name into Sébastien Japrisot – a surname borne by no one else by a man like no one else. He was a man of the south, son of an immigrant Neapolitan family from the Latin quarter of Marseilles, where all the great French talkers come from. His father had abandoned his wife and their six-year-old son and, for years after, his mother festooned men's underwear on her washing line in a vain attempt to disguise her husband's defection. Jean-Baptiste was sent to school with the Jesuits, always a promising start for rebellious individualists. But they taught him to write well, with a good training in the classics. He went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, a subject that bored him stiff. He skipped lectures in order to write.

He wrote his first novel, Les Mal-Partis (The False Start), when he was 17. It is a mesmerising tale of a 14-year-old boy who has a passionate love affair with a nun, one that ends almost in tragedy. It was published in 1950, and caused a scandal among the bien pensants and the clergy. But it was a great popular and critical success. In Britain it was extolled by Marghanita Laski and The Times Literary Supplement, which declared: "It has a tenderness and sincerity that make Les Mal-Partis a very remarkable first novel." In America, it sold 800,000 copies in three weeks.

This success led to Rossi's being put under contract to translate J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye and the later short stories. Inevitably Les Mal-Partis was compared with Raymond Radiguet's Le Diable au Corps (The Devil in the Flesh) of 1923; but that work now has an air of faded, almost sentimental, modishness, while Rossi's work endures in all its youthful freshness, because of its exemplary construction and depiction of character and its wartime setting of France in 1944.

For the six novels that followed, and their accompanying screenplays, he used his pseudonym Sébastien Japrisot. Among them we find Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders, 1962), which became Costa-Gavras's first film, in 1965, starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret; La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil (The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, 1966), shot in the same year in Britain by Anatole Litvak with Oliver Reed and Bernard Fresson framing Samantha Eggar. His thriller Piège pour Cendrillon (A Trap for Cinderella), was filmed by André Cayatte in 1965.

Japrisot's big novel Là-haut les tambours ("Drums on the Heights"), which he had intended to be his last, remained half-finished on his death. "Then I'll hang up my gloves. I think I'll be happier when I've finished with all that," he said in a radio interview, in a voice pathetically broken and hoarse from excess of alcohol and tobacco. "Treat everything with derision: it's the only way to counter misfortune," he said, bitterly.

His new film, Effroyables jardins (Appalling Gardens), is due to be released at the end of this month. His 1991 pacifist novel of the First World War, Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement), is being filmed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. All Japrisot's crime novels are about to be published in an omnibus volume. His very earliest work has recently been published as Ecrit par Jean-Baptiste Rossi.

James Kirkup