Maurice Dekobra was a French writer. His real name was Maurice Tessier. Seen as a subversive writer in the 1920s and 1930s, he became one of the best-known French writers between the First and the Second World Wars. His books have been translated into 77 languages. In spite of this, he has now been declared a "total unknown".

Biography

At the age of 19, he started his career as a trilingual journalist - French, English, German. During the 1914-18 War
he was attached as liaison officer/interpreter first to the Indian army, and later to the United States army. The contacts he made at this time ignited his passion for travel. He attributed the origin of his pen name to an episode in North Africa when he saw a snake charmer with two cobras. Allegedly he began thinking (in French of course!) of the "deux cobras", which led him to De-kobra, then Dekobra. The term 'dekobrisme' was coined from his fiction, which used journalistic features in his novels. He chose to live in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 from 1939 to 1946. Upon returning to France, he started writing whodunit

Whodunit

A whodunit or whodunnit is a complex, plot-driven variety of the detective story in which the puzzle is the main feature of interest. The reader or viewer is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed in the final...

s.

Some of his novels were made into films.