Diggin’ Vargas

Last summer, many of us were amused by French novelist Fred Vargas’ rambling acceptance speech during the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger Awards ceremony in London, during which her novel Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand (Sous les vents de Neptune) picked up the prestigious Duncan Lawrie International Dagger. This was an unprecedented event, as in the preceding year she had won the very same award for The Three Evangelists (Debout les Morts), both of those novels having been translated by Sîan Reynolds. And in 2005, Vargas (the pseudonym of Frédérique Audouin-Rouzeau) had been shortlisted for the Duncan Lawrie Gold Dagger for her novel Seeking Whom He May Devour (L’homme à l’envers, translated by David Bellos).

As I have recently found such enjoyment in translated European crime novels, I decided to give Ms. Vargas’ new novel, This Night’s Foul Work, a try. It’s the fifth of her Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg books to be translated and is delightfully dark, very weird, and a totally chilling tale. My problem now is that I need to go back and see what else of hers I should have been reading.

It seems that many others are also diggin’ the work of this archaeologist turned crime writer. Karen Meek posted a special report on Vargas’ work at the excellent Euro Crime site, including three reviews of This Nights Foul Work, which she says is “possibly Vargas’s quirkiest work to date and that’s saying something.” (Two other viewpoints on this same novel can be found here and here.) The only trouble is, as Meek notes, the English translations of Vargas’ stories are being published out of their original sequence.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Guardian newspaper today features an insightful profile of Vargas/Audouin-Rouzeau. It notes, in part, that

She is a distinguished archaeologist who has written important works on medieval social structures and on the epidemiology of the plague. She is also a vociferous and persistent critic of the French political and judicial systems as a prominent supporter of the fugitive Italian writer Cesare Battisti, exiled from France and currently in custody in Brazil, who is accused of committing terrorist offences in Italy in the 1970s.

But Vargas is now best known as a crime writer. Her stories of Adamsberg negotiating his rural Pyrenees roots with his job in a Parisian murder squad--in the latest novel, he places a pebble from a village stream on the desks of his wearily perplexed staff after a trip home--have not only topped the French bestseller lists, but stormed the English-speaking world. ...

Speaking in the offices of her French publisher in a courtyard just off the Place de la Bastille in Paris, Vargas exudes the focused intensity of the proselytising political activist. But she says her roles as scientist, campaigner and novelist are essentially separate. “I don’t think the detective story is there to change social reality. As a historian, I know that decisive victories in social and political problems are not made by authors. Émile Zola did it with J’accuse, but that wasn’t a novel. The novel serves other purposes, which are just as important and deep in their own way, but they are different to politics.”

Vargas appears to have perfected the art of crime writing so much so, that she now works remarkably fast, suffusing her tales with her love of history and archaeology.

Despite her own disappointment with her first novel, Vargas took to writing as she “did to smoking--it was an addictive habit”. She began to write the first drafts of new books during her three-week summer holidays, and followed this routine until four years ago when she took a break from archaeology. “I had completed two big projects and needed a rest. I had always been interested in the economic story of the Middle Ages, the Roman times and the 16th and 17th centuries. I wanted to paint a picture of economic life, but also cultural life, involving hunting and eating habits. Show me what someone eats, and I will show you who they were.” She ended up with a comparative research project that included over a thousand archaeological sites from different periods. “I then continued with another interest I had about the rat and the transmission of the plague--it had never been resolved to my satisfaction--and that took six years.”

With her books selling well enough for her to support herself and her son, she took a year off. “It was wonderful. I had all this time in front of me to work on another book. Three weeks later, it was finished. The problem never was me having to work in this way, the problem was me. I take time to correct and change the books, but my first drafts still take three weeks.”

The full Guardian piece can be found here. In it, Vargas cites her principal literary influences as Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In light of that, is it any wonder that her work is so surreal?