Fred Vargas

I've been deep into crime fiction, one of my favourite genres of literature (yes, I said literature. So there.) of late - and European crime fiction at that. Americans, I find, can write good thrillers and potboilers, which become all too predictable after the first three or four books, but when it comes to police procedurals, complete with imagination, ingenuity, detailing, characterisation, it's the Europeans who rule. And I have recently discovered yet another writer of police procedurals - a Frenchwoman, an academic, who goes by the decidedly unfeminine name of Fred Vargas.

Vargas' books are set in Paris, and her main character, Commissaire Principal Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, is clearly modelled on the detective who set the whole concept of urban police procedurals with a flawed, damaged even, policeman at the centre in motion - Chief Inspector Martin Beck, of the wonderful and canonical series of ten books written by the Swedish pair Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Like the Martin Beck series, where the city of Stockholm plays as huge a role as any character, Paris, with its quirks, its alleyways, its cafes and the various arrondisements into which it is divided, is a constant presence in the Adamsberg books. Like Beck, Adamsberg has a disturbed personal life; again, like Beck, he goes on to head a murder squad; couldn't care less about rules or his appearance or the image he portrays; is intuitive; solves pretty much every case assigned to him; is, by all accounts, an attractive man. That's where the similarity ends, though - but more on that later.

That Vargas is an academic is made abundantly clear in her plotlines, which very often have academics with esoteric specialisations and references and quotes from medieval tomes peppered liberally throughout - sometimes they even form the pivot around which the plot turns. Like her detective Adamsberg, who is prone to daydreaming and functions for the most part with 'his head in the clouds', Vargas' tales often take meandering turns down flights of fancy, with whole paragraphs devoted to disjointed and vaguely confused thoughts invested with the task of propelling the narrative forward. Adamsberg, we are told, is a gentle yet restless man - his voice has a peculiar soothing quality that lulls the listener to tranquillity and pushes them to confiding in him - a trait that comes in very useful during interrogations - yet he cannot stay still for a moment, preferring long walks to desk work, and constant activity at particularly pressing moments, when he most needs to think. His train of thought follows no apparent logic - intuition, of the almost mystical, clairvoyant kind (unlike Beck, whose flashes of insight were always rooted in reality, in fact and experience) is what leads him to an understanding of how, and why, the crime was committed.

Adamsberg's counterfoil is Inspector Danglard, his second-in-command - as addicted to logic as Adamsberg is to woolly chains of thought, a firm believer in the routine his superior holds in mild disdain. Danglard, with his alcoholism ('Tell me what you need me to do before four in the afternoon - I don't function too well after that'), his five children (two sets of twins, and one, the blue-eyed boy, 'was clearly not his', but his wife had dumped him on Danglard anyway) who he adored and who kept him sane, his unhappiness at his lack of physical attraction, which his impeccable clothing did nothing to compensate - is, somehow, a far more believable and endearing character than Adamsberg - as are the various other members of the Murder Squad - the intrepid Violette Retancourt and the wide-eyed Estalere, for instance. However, unlike the Martin Beck series, where Beck is a part of a team, whose other members are just as important - sometimes even more so - than the central character, Vargas tends to devote more space to Adamsberg dreamy soliloquies, which tend to grate at times - especially when some of the perpheral characters turn out to have much more heart than the principal one. This, perhaps, is one of the biggest flaws in Vargas' writing - that she has created a central character who is very difficult to identify with, or even like.

This flaw in a way also diminishes the rigor of police work - the dull routine slogging, which forms the bulk of police work, so carefully and intricately detailed by Sjowall and Wahloo (and by writers like Ian Rankin, P.D. James, Peter Robinson, Henning Mankell) is pushed to the background, and Adamsberg and his imaginative forays down paths where the proverbial angels fear to tread dominate - and so, at the end, you're at times left dissatisfied, unable to connect the dots that led to the denouement. Rigour is also sacrificed at the altar of what has clearly become the modern-day version of witchcraft - hacking. Hackers, the twenty-first century shamans with their codes and encryptions and viruses taking the place of spells and rites are now increasingly being turned to in the solution of murder mysteries - why follow clues or deal with forensics when you have someone to sit before a computer and almost intantly - CSI-style - provide you with all the answers you need, generously supplied by people too stupid to know better than to confide their deepest, darkest secrets to their computer's hard drives. I'm not sure, being almost a Luddite, if this is at all possible - all I know is that taking this easy short-cut has sounded the death knell of ingenuous police procedurals. It isn't just Vargas, but otherwise brilliant writers like Stieg Larsson who succumb to this temptation - thereby substantially eroding the charms of the good, old-fashioned detective novel.

The Adamsberg books are typically French, though, with their emphasis on the pleasures of a good cup of coffee or a glass of wine; the importance attached to people's clothes and styles of dressing - Adamsberg, who for the most part goes around looking 'like a pig's breakfast', is regarded as a curiosity because of his total disregard of what he wears; his sandals once moved a junior sufficiently to exclaim, in tones of great horror, 'You're surely not going out in those!'; sexual relationships are a necessary, but hardly all-consuming parts of characters' lives; and the French disdain for and amusement at English people and Canadians are all too apparent.

Vargas' books are interesting and informative, although sadly lacking in humour of the sort that was so apparent in the Martin Beck books - but then, aren't the French supposed to take themselves very seriously? - and well worth reading if you're a fan of police procedurals; however, if you like this genre to be rooted in solid police work, and if you like your detectives to be real and endearing like Martin Beck and his murder squad, or gritty like Rankin's Rebus, or as dogged and stubborn as Mankell's Kurt Wallander, you'll probably come away wanting more.