Jean-Baptiste Rossi (S?stien Japrisot), writer, screenwriter and film director: born Marseilles, France 4 July 1931; died Vichy, France 4 March 2003. The novelist Prosper M?m?said of the great historian Joseph-Arthur Gobineau: “He has the bump of comic observation.” S?stien 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 Ren?l?nt. In 1983, he won a C?r for the adaptation of his novel L’Et?eurtrier (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 S?stien 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.