It's a famille affaire, or What's with all those eccentric alternative households in French crime writing?

My knowledge of French literature is thin, so maybe someone can tell me the reason for and the history of French crime writing's fascination with plucky, eccentric, down at the heels households.

Daniel Pennac's Malaussène novels, Fred Vargas' Adamsberg novels, and, especially, her books featuring the "Three Evangelists" come to mind. More recently, Pierre Lemaitre's The Great Swindle won France's Prix Goncourt for its story of an epic swindle and counter-swindle that revolve around two wretched veterans of World War I who come together for mutual support.

That sort of thing can get precious and sentimental (though Lemaitre weaves it into a harsh look at social fissures and abuse of power in post-war France. Think of The Great Swindle as a meeting of the Pennac-Vargas and the Manchette-Manotti strands of French crime writing.)

But the eccentric-household novels also include something hard to imagine in American or British crime writing: Economically precarious characters, depicted in all their poverty, but without desperation, horror, sloganeering, or proletarian victimhood or nobility. The closest that Vargas' Dog Will Have His Day comes to the last of these is a passing reference to the protagonists' having come together in a tumble-down house after a recession. (Dog Will Have His Day, published in French in 1996 but not translated into English until 2014, is a sequel to The Three Evangelists, two of whom appear here.)

These characters don't drink themselves to death, and they don't turn up frozen in the street. A character loses her home, and she simply moves in with another character. Unlike their unfortunate counterparts in crime writing from other countries, these characters have driving passions, or eccentricities, that earn them a modest living, keep their minds engaged, or both.  The protagonist of Dog Will Have His Day is a former government functionary who is driven to compile journalistic dossiers and solve mysteries.  Each of the three evangelists, so called because their names are Marc, Mathieu, and Lucien, is a historian with a greater than usual devotion to the period he studies. (I like to think Vargas uses Marc, the medievalist who is a featured sidekick in Dog Will Have His Day, to poke some good-natured fun at her own work as an archaeologist of the Middle Ages.)

So, what's with the eccentric households? Are they too twee for words? Or are they brave declarations that poverty need not mean intellectual or physical death?

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Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interviews with Fred Vargas and with her translator, Sian Reynolds.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

The French are coming! The French are coming!

Amid fascinating new theories I've been reading about the origins of English (Stephen Oppenheimer's Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain could easily include chapters called "No Saxons, Please; We're English," "All Angles," or "Some of My Best Friends are Jutes"), comes crime fiction news about the French:

Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, translated by Sian Reynolds, and Pierre Lemaitre's Alex, translated by Frank Wynne, were named joint winners this week of the International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction by the Crime Writers' Association in the UK. The news release announcing the award says the CWA plans to establish a French chapter "in the near future."

Wynne, Lemaitre, and fellow French authors Antonin Varenne and Xavier-Marie Bonnot attended Bristol's Crimefest 2013 along with your humble blogkeeper, so perhaps French crime writing is about to start enjoying a higher profile in the UK and then, perhaps, in America (Alex is to be released in the U.S. in September.)

Whatever its profile in the UK at large, French crime writing has enjoyed an outsize profile at the Daggers. This year marked the fifth time in the International Dagger's eight-year history that the award had gone to a French novel or novels. The award was the fourth for Vargas/Reynolds, following on The Three Evangelists in 2006, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007, and The Chalk Circle Man in 2009. Dominique Manotti's  Lorraine Connection, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz, was the other French winner, in 2008.

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Your humble blogkeeper interviewed Fred Vargas last month and Sian Reynolds in 2008. It was Reynolds' solution to a bit of untranslatable wordplay in The Three Evangelists that spurred me to start interviewing authors and translators in the first place. I also reviewed The Ghost Riders of Ordebec in the Philadelphia Inquirer in June.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas in my newspaper ...

... not here and now also online! My review of Vargas' latest novel, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

My two-part interview with Vargas earlier this month expanded on questions touched on in the review. No surprise there; The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was what made me want to interview her in the first place. Vargas uses her much-ballyhooed quirkiness to good advantage in the book, and she offers a fine explanation for that quirkiness in the interview.

Thanks to Paul Davis for letting me know the review had turned up online.

*

In the meantime, I've finished reading Barry Cunliffe's Britain Begins and started his Europe Between the Oceans. It's refreshing to read stories told on such a large scale, combining hard science and informed speculation, told by a master of his subject who is unafraid to admit when the existing state of knowledge simply does not permit a question to be answered.  The man can write, too, and his story is as exciting as any tale of aliens or lost Atlantises, but without the looniness and the unsavory preying on the gullibility of the weak-minded.

Cunliffe takes the longue durée approach to history. That is, he focuses on long-term environmental and geographical structures that underlie and outlast wars, migrations, and other such events of traditional history.  The term longue durée is associated with the Annales School of French historians, coined by Fernand Braudel, author of The Identity of France, the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, and others.

Among the great man's translators was Sian Reynolds, who, when not translating some of the most influential historical writing of the twentieth century, translates the crime novels of — Fred Vargas.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

"A detective novel belongs to the great family of tales, legends, myths": The Fred Vargas Detectives Beyond Borders interview, Part 2

In the conclusion of her interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Fred Vargas gets inside protagonist Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg's head. She discusses the origin of Adamsberg's name and says detective stories are really myths and tales. (This may explain her penchant for quirky characters.) She discusses her abiding love for secondary characters, reveals that Lt. Violette Retancourt arose from the dead, and finally, shares the joys and agonies of writing a character who insists on recurring, book after book.

(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders: You told L’Express newspaper that “Adamsberg is not a man of intuition.” Why do so many reviewers say otherwise? 

Fred Vargas: I don’t like excessively simple definitions of an human being, real or invented. It is not this adjective I would choose for him (but you know, I still don’t know Adamsberg totally. Sometimes he gets on my nerves — too slow — sometimes he surprises me, and so on.) I would rather say, I suppose, that this awakened dreamer has more possibilities than others of having the doors opened between his subconscious and conscious minds. That’s why, I suppose, ideas come to him in a strange manner. Also because he has an exceedingly strong visual memory.

DBB: Your novels are full of human marvels, the man who talks backwards in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, for example or Violette Retancourt. Where does this motif come from ? Why is it important to you? 

FV: I don’t know! I have never tried on purpose to create strange characters. But, once again, they come to me like this, they impose their personalities on me. So, I go with it, and sometimes, it may be fun. I suppose also that I am no fan of so-called «normality». 

DBB: One could interpret the name Adamsberg as Adam + berg, the German word for mountain. Adamsberg was born in a village in the Pyrénées. Is he the natural or original man who comes from the mountains? 

FV: That’s a good example. When I chose this name for him (I don’t especially like the sound of French names), I did research, I checked that no one had this name. I realized only later that it could signify «Adam’s berg», Adam’s mountain. And it isn’t at all, of course, a name from the Pyrénées. Original or natural? I would prefer «natural». What I surely wanted (and don’t ask me why!) is that he would be a man from the mountain. 

DBB: You write often about improvised families : the family in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, the protagonists of The Three Evangelists, Danglard without a wife but with five children whom he loves, Adamsberg and his son. Your novels remind me in this respect of Daniel Pennac’s novels, and maybe also of Michel Foucault, who would talk about new forms of family relations. Discuss, if you would, the role of families in your books, and why they appear so frequently. 

FV: Again, I must «discuss» the thing after the fact, because these strangely composed families come naturally. What is sure is that I don’t want to insert the normal day-after-day life in my novels. Not because I don’t like it, but because, from my instinctive (and intellectual) point of view, a detective novel belongs to the great family of tales, legends, myths, etc., and not to realistic literature. So I am not attracted, in a book, by usual families or situations. Too real. These groups enforce the sensation of writing a small, dreamed tale. 

DBB: You admire Ed McBain for having created eternal characters, who do not change from one novel to the next. How do you manage this with Adamsberg, Danglard, Retancourt while at the same time preserving their interesting, distinguishing characteristics? 

FV: Actually, I deeply admire Ed McBain (and James Crumley, and Donald Westlake and Kinky Friedman and so on) for the exceptional sound of his language. I appreciate encountering his characters, Meyer Meyer, Carella, Bert Kling, but that isn’t my main reason for reading him over and over. His music is. 

The problem with meeting the same characters book after book is a solid one, and I don’t know if it represents an advantage. My first three books introduced different characters each time. Adamsberg appeared in the fourth. Then I abandoned him for three books. Then he decided to come back. So you see that I hadn’t planed to create a recurring hero, (In fact, I had planed nothing. I just wanted, at the very beginning, to write one single book for fun.) 

Then other characters gathered around Adamsberg, important ones and the so-called «secondary ones». I am always sad to have to quit a secondary character at the end of a book (never to see Joss the fisherman again, or the old man who speaks to his sheep, etc.). At the beginning of Seeking Whom He May Devour, I was obliged to kill Suzanne. I realized I was sad to lose her in this way. She remained in my head; I had affection for her. That’s why I decided to make her live again afterwards, by creating Violette Retancourt — without knowing Retancourt would attain such importance (without my authorization). 

And so the group grows, and the more I know them, the more it seems to me painful to abandon them. It is as if I was going to lose old friends, friends I don’t yet know completely. I was puzzled by the Evangelists’ disappearance. That’s why, here and there, one of them reappears sometimes (Marc, or Mathias).

For one book, I decided to create a rival for Adamsberg; I introduced Veyrenc, who would have to leave the scene at the end of the book. In the end he stayed. So you see that I have never had the ambition to create an «unforgettable hero». It is just that I can’t forget them, or they don’t want to let me in peace. It is a link, a real link. But it is difficult, a challenge: how to describe Adamsberg again and again, from book to book, without repeating the same sentences, using the same words. Not easy at all!

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(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas: The Detectives Beyond Borders interview, Part I

Fred Vargas has won three CWA International Dagger Awards for best translated crime novel, and The Ghost Riders of Ordebec could win her and translator Sian Reynolds a fourth this year.

Vargas was born in Paris, trained as an archaeologist and historian, and is known best to crime-fiction readers for her novels about the Paris police commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his colleagues, novels that partake as much of the fairy tale as they do of the police procedural. 

In the first part of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Vargas talks about Algeria, about the overlap between her careers as author and scientist, about the real story behind her entirely positive trip to my native land, and about the careers of the title characters in The Three Evangelists. She prefaces her answers with remarks that shed light on her working methods (and, perhaps, on my overly analytical questions), and she quotes another notable figure famous under a name other than the one he was born with:

"Dear Peter Rozovsky, 

"First of all, I am afraid to disappoint you. As Woody Allen said: `I have no answers to your questions, but I have questions to your answers!' 

"I just want to say that I don’t control everything I do when I am writing novels. A large part of the story comes — or, better, imposes itself — during the writing, and takes me along unforeseen ways that I am obliged to follow. Ways where I can meet characters that I had not envisaged previously, for example the old woman, Léone, whom Adamsberg meets in the path in the forest at the beginning of The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. And there it goes. In a way, I don’t have great freedom, because the book and the words want to decide (except for the sound). 

"So, it is difficult for me to `explain' everything, and you will be probably disappointed by my answers!"

Happily, she is wrong. Enjoy the interview. (And read Part II.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders: The dead father in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was a torturer in Algeria, a sadist but at the same time a wounded victim of that war. What do Algeria – and the word torture – mean for France and the French in 2013? For you as an author of crime novels?

Fred Vargas: Not as an author of crime novels. What the French army did in Algeria, the torture, remains a great shame for a large part of us. It can’t be and musn’t be forgotten, even if I was a child during this war.

DBB: You call the young fire starter in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec so frequently by the diminutive «Mo» that it’s a surprise when someone calls him by his real name: Mohammed. Why did you do this?

FV: Well, when I present a new character, I don’t say if he or she is white or black or Asiatic. I don’t mention his or her religion, either. So everybody thinks, instinctively, «OK, he or she is white and «classical» (Christian or without any faith). But this is not certain!!! Do we know if Danglard, Retancourt, others, come from Christian or Jewish families, for example? No. And I don’t mind. If I explained, in the beginning, that Mo had Arabic origins, I would single him out. Why should I do that? Mo is Mo, first of all.

In fact, a presentation of his origins would be a form of pre-racism, a sort of discrimination, and I hate that, especially now, with our toxic climate here against French people of Arab origin, the new so-called enemies. OK, he is Mo, as Adamsberg is Adamsberg. Later, the reader will understand why his origin will help transform him into an ideal culprit. But that his name is Mohammed does not imply that he practices the Muslim religion or believes in God. We don’t know that.

DBB: The title characters in The Three Evangelists are historians, one of prehistory, one of the Middle Ages, one of World War I. Why those three historical periods.

FV: I am an archaeologist myself. I specialized in the Middle Ages, but I also studied the prehistoric period. And my eldest brother is an historian, too, one of the foremost specialists in the First World War. It was an obvious pleasure for me to play with these professions I know very well.

DBB: I was born in Montreal, and I appreciated the tension, the jokes, and the linguistic misunderstanding between the French and the Quebecois in Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. Why did you send Adamsberg and his team to Quebec in that book ? If you have visited Quebec yourself, did you experience tension of this kind?

FV: Again, a disappointment for you, with a very simple answer: I am not a great traveler, but I have been to Quebec twice. So, as I wanted to go out of Paris, out of France, I placed the action there, where I had been fascinated by the kindness of people, the great beauty of landscapes. I know the small, ancient path across the forest along the Outaouais River. And I was also very interested in the differences between languages from Quebec and France.

Tensions? Not at all, never. Often, with friends, we laughed together about our different expressions. After the publications, there were some people from Quebec who criticized these jokes about language, thinking that I was mocking them. I was sad about this misunderstanding and wrote an article in Le Devoir to explain that it was respect and curiosity.


DBB: The plague plays an important role in Have Mercy on Us All. You have done research on the plague. What is the relationship between your two careers, as a historian and as an author? What does each take from the other?

FV: I assumed over the years that there was no link between my two jobs. Writing detective stories was a way to forget in a small way the hard scientific work during holidays. But little by little, I understood that, probably, my passion for resolving things, problems, for finding the truth, was at the very heart of the two jobs.

In any case, I try not to exaggerate when I use some historical or zoological knowledge in a book. It must remain a detective story, not become a historical one with lessons and everything boring. I had worked seven years to resolve the plague’s epidemiology, and I was tempted to use this great disease as a symbol of a great fear in a novel, so I did. But as I said, it is not me who choose my ideas, unfortunately, it is the ideas which choose me. And the ideas said : «Well, put the plague in this book.» And I answered : «OK.» I write my scientific papers and books in a very different manner, of course. But even there, I try not to lose the reader’s interest.

***

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas' ghosts

Early in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, Fred Vargas takes her odd, intuitive protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, to Normandy, where he comes up against a police captain almost as unconventional as he is. Neither, for example, can stand being cooped up too long; both, apparently, like to chew over cases while on long walks, not a conventional police technique, at least in fiction.

The Ghosts Riders of Ordebec is Vargas' seventh Adamsberg novel, and her clever turn on small-town cop who resents his opposite number from the big city (Adamsberg is based in Paris) is one way to keep a longish series fresh. How do your favorite long-series crime writers manage that trick?

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The ghosts of the title refer the avenging marauders of a thousand-year-old Ordebec legend and, in the opening pages, Vargas integrates the weirdness seamlessly into the story. I'm no reader of fantasy, but Vargas' world is one that very closely resembles our own, except that beliefs, tales, even professions, from the Middle Ages fit in perfectly. (No accident there; Vargas is a historian and archaeologist specializing in the Middle Ages when she's not writing crime novels.)

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(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas. Read an interview from earlier in Vargas' career that offers insight into her political involvement. Read a two-part Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Vargas' versatile, award-winning translator, Sian Reynolds.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Sian Reynolds: An interview with Fred Vargas' translator, Part II

Blogging may be lighter than usual for the next day or two. In the meantime, here's an interview from 2008 with Sian Reynolds, translator of Fred Vargas' crime novels, with a brand-new comment from another prominent translator of crime fiction.

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In Part II of our interview, Sian Reynolds discusses the challenges of rendering colloquial French into colloquial English and her approach to a text she is about to translate. She also reveals that readers can look forward to at least one more Fred Vargas translation. (Read Part I of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)

What is the most difficult problem you have encountered as translator?

In fiction, as already mentioned, I think it has to be dialogue. and particularly such aspects of it as dialect, extreme colloquialism, slang, expletives (of the ‘good grief’ sort) and of course puns and wordplay. You have to find convincing speakable equivalents without sounding either too fuddy-duddy or using current colloquialisms that might date. A particular problem for example, is the common French word ‘un type’ which just means ‘a man’, but the register is more the equivalent of ‘bloke, fellow, chap’ – all of which are today a bit marked as old-fashioned in English, because so many people both sides of the Atlantic now say ‘guy’. On the other hand, peppering the text with too many ‘guys’ runs the risk of making it sound like an American intrusion into otherwise British English, which is what I write. (Of course many French books are translated ‘into American’ as the French say, that is entirely into American English.)

Swearing is another potential pitfall. French colloquial speech uses a number of terms which if translated literally sound rather stronger in English (merde, je m’en fous, etc.) Given what we know about the characters, you have to save four-letter words for times when the context calls for them. The reverse can be true: French translators of say, James Kelman, have been known to tone down the language, arguing that a French equivalent of the character wouldn’t have every other word in the sentence the same f-word.

How do you approach a text you are about to translate? Do you read it through one or more times to get a sense of the work before beginning the formal job of translation? What is your primary task as a translator of fiction?

I always read the text first if it’s fiction. For non-fiction it’s not so essential – you’ll get there in the end. But much crime fiction, as you know, is constructed backwards – as a rule you move back from the discovery of a crime to what occasioned it. You need to know the end to understand the beginning. Then in the course of translating a novel, I probably read the text tens of times in both languages, always noticing more things – (sometimes minor inconsistencies that have slipped in, but are probably only noticed by me, since most readers don’t read a novel many times over.) Your task in general is to do as good a job of conveying the original as possible – but no translation is ever perfect or ‘definitive’, and no two translators will come up with the same solutions.

Translators of poetry often speak of the tension between trying to produce a faithful translation and one that will flow smoothly in its "host" language. To what extent is this tension present in translating fiction?

The biggest question in translating poetry, according to the translators I know, is whether or not to preserve the form of the poem: its metre, rhyme, line length and so on. Views differ strongly. As it happens, in the latest Vargas (This Night’s Foul Work) one character sometimes speaks in 12-syllable alexandrines, (a pastiche of Racine’s plays,) and they were the devil to translate because 12 syllables, with a break after the sixth what’s more, is not at all common in English verse; but it seemed important to keep it, because of all the text references.

On the general question of ‘readability’, all translators in my experience face the same old dilemma: ‘whether to take the reader closer to the author, or the author closer to the reader’, i.e. make it more faithful to the original, or more ‘at home’ in the target language. It’s a matter of genre in some ways. My view is that it’s important that the reader should be aware that he/she is reading a translation, and not imagine that the book was originally written in English. Hence my decisions to keep things like street names and occasional French words in the original. But Fred’s books are very readable – if quirky! – in French, and I try to get as much of that across as possible, so that reading them is (I hope) fun.

A personal note: As a non-fluent speaker and reader of French, I find it easier to read social science than fiction and easier to read the philosophes and publicists of the 18th and 19th centuries than I do Montaigne, whose work I love in English translation. Is this often the case with non-native speakers of French? If so, why (other than Montaigne's meandering sentences)?

You’re right, Montaigne is very, very hard to read in French. Sixteenth-century authors are much more difficult generally than seventeenth and eighteenth because they wrote before French grammarians had set about rationalising the language. Eighteenth-century texts are written in much clearer French. Montaigne’s vocabulary and syntax as well as his own style, make it a real challenge. There are some modern French editions which have ‘modernised’ his French to make it more comprehensible for today’s French readers – worth a look.

With the publication of This Night's Foul Work, four of Fred Vargas' books about commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and one of three about the Three Evangelists will have been translated into English. Can readers expect more translations of Vargas into English?

You’ll have to ask the publisher that – but at least one more is in the pipeline: I have just finished translating the first Adamsberg story, originally published in 1991.

(Read Part I of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)


© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Reading in tongues

I took a break from crime yesterday to read a bit of Fernand Braudel on the history of Mediterranean civilizations.

I can always read Braudel in French. His style is lucid, his prose bold and enthusiastic, and his thrust and intent always clear enough to overcome the occasional gaps in my French vocabulary. (Context is a fine teacher.)

But I have never been able to read fiction as easily in a language not my own. One cannot as easily skip a word in fiction without missing the gist, I think, and the resulting doubt ruins my enjoyment.

When I find my copy of Andrea Camilleri's novel The Snack Thief, I'll try reading it side by side with its Italian original, Il ladro di merendine. For now, the parts I can comprehend most easily as I flip through the Italian version are the language-mangling Catarella's speeches.

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I'm not the only one who approaches fiction and non-fiction differently. Sian Reynolds, who has translated Braudel into English and has also shared three CWA International Dagger awards for her translations of Fred Vargas, had this to say about her approach to translation in the first-ever interview at Detectives Beyond Borders:

"I always read the text first if it’s fiction. For non-fiction it’s not so essential – you’ll get there in the end."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Merde!

Merde is the glue that holds Fred Vargas' three evangelists together:

"Ils cherchaient. Un autre fou dans la merde."

and

"Dans la merde" demanda-t-il?"

"Précisément. ... Ennui, désillusion, écriture en solitude."

"Mais alors il est dans la merde ... Tu ne pouvais pas la dire tout de suite?"

and

"(L)es trois chercheurs de merde se retrouvèrent tassés autour d'un grand feu."

and

"Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça."

Marc, Matthias and Lucien, the three "evangelists" of the novel's English title, come together because all are in merde. Too bad that merde, or rather its English equivalent, is frowned upon in American publications. But even then, shit is both far harsher in tone and far narrower in meaning than merde.

Siân Reynolds, who translated Vargas' Debout les morts into English as The Three Evangelists, told Detectives Beyond Borders last year that:

"Swearing is another potential pitfall. French colloquial speech uses a number of terms which if translated literally sound rather stronger in English (merde, je m’en fous, etc.) Given what we know about the characters, you have to save four-letter words for times when the context calls for them."

She renders merde variously as down on his luck or in a bad way, chercheurs de merde as seriously unemployed historians, and "Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça" as "Not so easy either, for the poor medievalists."

The translation loses the unifying, amusing effect of the repeated merde, both meaning and sound, but what can a translator do except shrug, mutter a quiet merde!, and get on with her work?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Meet your CWA Dagger winners, plus a question for readers

The Crime Writers' Association in the UK presented its International Dagger, Short Story Dagger, Dagger in the Library and Debut Dagger awards tonight in London. (See information on the short-listed titles at the CWA Web site.) The CWA was also to announce its short lists for the Gold (the big prize), John Creasey (New Blood) and Ian Fleming Steel Daggers, about which more later.

Up for the International Dagger for best crime, thriller, suspense or spy novel translated into English for UK publication were:

• Karin Alvtegen, Shadow, translated by McKinley Burnett
• Arnaldur Indriðason, The Arctic Chill, translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Crib
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, translated by Reg Keeland
• Jo Nesbø, The Redeemer, translated by Don Bartlett
• Johan Theorin, Echoes from the Dead, translated by Marlaine Delargy
• Fred Vargas, The Chalk Circle Man, translated by Siân Reynolds

Other short-listed authors whose names have popped up at Detectives Beyond Borders include Sean Chercover, Colin Cotterill, R.J. Ellory, Ariana Franklin and Peter James.

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• Colin Cotterill wins the Dagger in the Library award.
• Catherine O'Keefe wins the Debut Dagger for The Pathologist.
• A big huzzah to Short Story Dagger winner Sean Chercover, who becomes the first Noir at the Bar guest to win a Dagger.
• And finally, Fred Vargas and translator Sian Reynolds (a previous Detectives Beyond Borders interview subject) win their third International Dagger in four years for The Chalk Circle Man.

Congratulations to the winners, thanks to Ali Karim for his live Twitter updates, and, on a personal note, an expression of amazement at how quickly the presentations went. At the Oscars, the winner for sound engineering in a short foreign-language animated film would be still be thanking his wife, his producers, God, and the good people of his hometown.

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And now, your opinions, please. What was the biggest Dagger surprise? That five of the six short-listed International Dagger books were from Nordic countries? That the one non-Nordic entrant won? That French novels have won every International Dagger? That three of those have gone to a woman named Fred?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The day of the short(list) Daggers

The Crime Writers' Association has announced most of the short lists for the 2009 Dagger Awards. The International Dagger list for crime novels in translation reflects the continuing popularity of Nordic crime fiction, with three Swedish novels and one each from Norway and Iceland. Fred Vargas and translator Siân Reynolds, already two-time Dagger winners for Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007 and The Three Evangelists in 2006, are the only non-Nordic contenders on this year's short list.

Shadow by Karin Alvtegen, translated from the Swedish by McKinley Burnett (Steven T. Murray)

Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indriðason, translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland (Steven T. Murray)

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds

Shortlistees for best short story include Sean Chercover, a guest at the first international Noir at the Bar earlier this year.

Read more about the nominees on the CWA Web site here and in Barry Forshaw's Times preview here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interviews with CWA shortlist picks

The U.K.'s Crime Writers Association has announced the shortlists for its Dagger awards, which are to be presented in London next month.

The lists include two subjects of 2008 Detectives Beyond Borders interviews: Sian Reynolds, nominated with Fred Vargas for the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for her translation of Vargas' This Night's Foul Work, and Matt Rees, up for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for The Bethlehem Murders (The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the U.S.).

Other shortlistees include Colin Cotterill, Duncan Lawrie Dagger for The Coroner's Lunch; Andrea Camilleri and translator Stephen Sartarelli, Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for The Patience of the Spider, and Martin Edwards, Short Story Dagger for ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice.’

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Celebrate Awards Week with one more free book by Fred Vargas

An extra copy of Fred Vargas' This Night's Foul Work has arrived at Detectives Beyond Borders, which means you have one more chance to win!

Three celebrated crime novels by three much-honored authors have just had or are about to have their U.S. paperback releases. Over the next few days, you'll have a chance to see what the fuss is about, as Detectives Beyond Borders gives away one copy of each book to the first reader who can answer a skill-testing question.

First up, from Penguin, is This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas, which won Vargas the second of her two Duncan Lawrie International Dagger awards from the Crime Writers’ Association in the U.K. This fourth of Vargas' mysteries about the dreamy, abstracted but hard-working and brilliant Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg released in English may be, as one admiring reviewer commented, even quirkier than the earlier Adamsberg novels.

Like those books, it brings back Adamsberg's large cast of colleagues, including the large and devoted Violette Retancourt, and the wine-indulging right-hand man Adrien Danglard, as logical as Adamsberg is intuitive. Like those books as well, This Night's Foul Work offers an excursion through the physical and human geography of a region of France, this time Normandy. It also takes Adamsberg on an excursion through his own past. Here, though, that past takes the form not just of Adamsberg's old girlfriend Camille, but also of a brilliant pathologist with whom Adamsberg had once almost become romantically involved, and of a new police recruit from a village in the Pyrenees next to Adamsberg's own native village.

The barest outline of the story seems familiar: two men are found dead in Paris' Port de la Chapelle flea market. The drug squad wants the case, but Adamsberg insists that the murders are about more than drug dealing, and he refuses to surrender jurisdiction. Lest you believe this is a routine police procedural, though, note the ghost that inhabits Adamsberg's new house. The cat that is an expert tracker. The police officer who speaks in twelve-syllable Alexandrine verse. As is often the case with Vargas, you're apt to find yourself enjoying the odd stories and eccentric sub-plots, reading slowly, and being pleasantly reminded that, yes, there is also a mystery going on. There may be a bit more mystery than usual, actually, as Vargas slips in an extra bit or two of misdirection.

You can win a copy by being the first to correctly answer this two-part question (and if you have not won a Detectives Beyond Borders competition in the past three months): Fred Vargas often takes her characters out of Paris to a different region of France in each book. In one novel, however, she takes them out of the country altogether. To which country? And in which novel? Send your answers along with your name and postal address to detectivesbeyondborders(at)earthlink(dot)net.

In the meantime, here's a roundup of Vargas reviews from Euro Crime. And read my two-part interview with Vargas' translator, Sian Reynolds, whose name is right up there on those Daggers with Vargas'.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Fred fest

Euro Crime is marking the UK release of Fred Vargas' latest novel, This Night's Foul Work, with a roundup of everything the Euro Crime stable of reviewers has had to say about the Vargases translated into English to date. That's eleven reviews of five novels by five reviewers, unless I've lost count (plus a kind heads-up about my interview with Vargas' translator, Sian Reynolds).

I noticed two comments in particular: Maxine Clarke's on Seeking Whom He May Devour ("I've never read a book quite like this one") and Fiona Walker's on Have Mercy On Us All ("I can guarantee it's like nothing you've read before").

I noted those remarks with interest because I wrote about my own first Vargas novel, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, that "I have never read an opening chapter like this before in a crime novel." Now, if that many people think Vargas is original, she's original.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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An interview with Fred Vargas' translator – Sian Reynolds, Part I

Sian Reynolds is the only translator to win a Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association. In fact, she is the only two translators to win the award. She and Fred Vargas received the first Duncan Lawrie International Dagger in 2006 for Vargas' novel The Three Evangelists and repeated the next year for Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. Professor Reynolds has also translated several books by Fernand Braudel, the seminal 20th-century French historian.

Sian Reynolds is professor emerita of French at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her most recent crime-fiction translation is Vargas' This Night's Foul Work. In this two-part interview, she discusses Fred Vargas, the art and practice of translation, and why the merde flies so liberally in French writing. (Read Part II of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)

You have translated one of the 20th century’s great social, or human, scientists, Fernand Braudel, into English as well as one of the world’s most popular crime novelists, Fred Vargas. How did you make the transition to translating fiction? How does fiction differ from nonfiction from a translator’s point of view?

Until quite recently I translated only works by historians because it fitted my own academic interests. Translating Braudel was an education in itself. You tend to get typecast, so for ages no one asked me to translate fiction. The two are not as different as you might think. In both cases, you are concerned to provide as accurate an equivalent of the original text as possible for readers in the target language, and you need to be committed to the author’s project. Briefly, for history that nearly always means acquiring expertise in the context: doing a lot of reading around the text in both languages, so as not to mislead through ignorance. In fiction, the novel provides its own context, and you have to be attentive to the world the writer has created.

In the particular case of Vargas, that world is partly that of the classic French ‘polar’, or police-novel, but at the same time it has undercurrents from fairy-tale and medieval romance. And translating a detective novel always means being scrupulous about stylistic detail,because such texts are full of hidden references, often verbal, which may be clues.

How did you come to work with Fred Vargas? And how does it feel to be the only translator ever honored by the Crime Writers' Association?

I already knew Fred Vargas’s books well, and had taught them as examples of fiction and translation exercises with my students at Stirling. My former Edinburgh colleague David Bellos, now in Princeton, did two excellent translations of the first of her books to appear in English (Have Mercy On Us All and Seeking Whom He May Devour – shortlisted by the CWA). When his academic work prevented him having time to do more, Harvill Secker, with David’s encouragement, offered me a contract, since the publisher already knew my Braudel translations.

About the awards, Fred’s books weren’t the first translated books to win CWA daggers. For instance, the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason’s Silence of the Grave won the Gold Dagger in 2005, and his translator, Bernard Scudder, was thus honoured too, though I don’t know whether the prize was shared. And there must have been others. I’m a Henning Mankell fan myself.

The difference with the new arrangement, when the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger was created in 2006, is that for the first time, it included a separate CWA-sponsored dagger for the translator. I felt surprised, grateful and honoured to get it. I think it’s both generous and right of the CWA to recognise translators as a group, since their work is sometimes taken for granted. I’m sure the competition will always be very stiff. There are many terrific translators of foreign crime fiction these days!

I've just spoken of your working "with" Fred Vargas. To what extent is translation an act of collaboration with an author? To what extent is it an act of individual creativity on the translator's part?

With a living author, it’s always possible to have some communication. When I’ve asked Fred questions about particular points she has always been very cooperative. And she reads and speaks English well herself. But in general she has been pretty hands-off, and left it to me. The translator is a kind of representative of the English-speaking readership: Fred’s books are quirky and often fantastical, sometimes with historical elements, and much appreciated in France. They are about French characters usually in a recognizably French environment, and will necessarily seem a bit foreign to anglophone readers, so the aim is to make them enjoyable on their own terms – but in English.

In Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, a group of Parisian police officers travel to Quebec for seminars with Canadian investigators. Vargas makes each group’s occasional misunderstanding of the other’s brand of French a source of friction. You chose not to render this into English. Could you give an example or two that help explain why you decided as you did?

I did aim to have the Canadian – Quebecois – characters speak in a different idiom from the French ones as much as possible, and had a Canadian friend read it through. The French spoken in Quebec is quite hard for French-from-France people to understand the first time they hear it. In the book, the French characters openly express their difficulty at following their Canadian colleagues’ speech. There is a distinct vocabulary, syntax and a set of colloquial idioms, as well as a particular accent. One short example which I cut (there are very few such cuts) is when Danglard is explaining Quebecois idiom to his colleagues, p. 109 in the French edition:

‘Par exemple, répondit Danglard, ‘Tu veux-tu qu’on gosse autour toute la nuitte?’

‘Ce qui veut dire?’ ‘On ne va pas tergiverser là-dessus toute la nuit’ [Eng: We’re not going to dither about it all night’]

The French are also surprised at immediate ‘tutoiement’ which I changed to ‘using first-names straight away’ which is (still, just) a slight European-North American difference. The Canadians on the other hand say that the French officers ‘talk like in a book’, so I tried to mark that too a bit.

The chief problem in this case is that English speakers from Britain have no problem understanding English speakers from Canada or the US and vice versa – we can always understand transatlantic English, even if there are some turns of phrase particular to Canada. The question of linguistic variants or dialects is very tricky in fiction. You could argue, for example, that many English people find it hard to follow Glasgow speech, so the quebecois characters could have been ‘lent’ a Scottish idiom – but in a novel about Canada that would sound pretty unconvincing! It doesn’t affect the plot at all, it merely adds to the atmosphere of ‘dépaysement’ – uprootedness, which Adamsberg in particular has to face in Canada. I felt in all honesty I should put a note in the book saying that I had cut a few examples of incomprehension, but I compensated by referring quite often to this misunderstanding, introducing as many Canadianisms as possible, and pointing up the friction in other ways.

A more humble problem arises in The Three Evangelists, where a character finds a beech tree has materialized in her yard and wonders who or what is haunting her in this strange manner. The uncanniness is magnified by the identical pronunciation of the French words for beech (hêtre) and a being (être). Perhaps, Sophia wonders, she is being confronted by something less innocent than a tree. ("Un hêtre. Un être?") You chose a different sort of wordplay for the English version. What factors guided your choice? How often does Vargas’ writing force you to make such decisions?

In that case an exact equivalent wasn’t possible, though the echo of ‘being’ was one solution. But there is a much more important example in the same book, which I can’t reveal: a clue is left on a car and the wordplay in French is ambiguous, with an effect on the plot. I thought a lot before coming up with my version which I think works OK and doesn’t give the game away too soon, while respecting the original. In the latest book, there is some play in chapter 1 on the word ‘parquet’ which means both the prosecution in a court of law and a parquet floor in French – you’ll have to see whether you think my solution works. This one doesn’t affect the plot.

(Read Part II of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The things a translator has to cope with

I've admired the work of Siân Reynolds, translator from French into English of the crime novelist Fred Vargas and the historian Fernand Braudel. In particular, I liked a note that Reynolds appended to Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, her Dagger-winning translation of Vargas' Sous les vents de Neptune.

That novel takes Paris police Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his colleagues to Quebec, where tension ensues with their Canadian counterparts. Among the sources of the tension is misunderstanding due to idiomatic differences between Quebecois French and the French spoken in France. Reynolds explains that she excluded that aspect of the misunderstanding from her translation, fearing (probably rightly) that it would be impossible to render successfully into English.

Debout les Morts (The Three Evangelists), also a Dagger winner, contains a similar necessary loss in translation, though on a smaller scale. Readers may recall that the novel begins when a worried singer finds that a beech tree has materialized overnight in her yard. Who or what, poor Sophia wonders, is haunting her in this strange manner? The uncanniness of the situation is magnified by the identical pronunciation in French of the words for beech (hêtre) and a being (être). Perhaps, Sophia wonders, she is being confronted by something less innocent than a tree. ("Un hêtre. Un être?")

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Fred Vargas' France

"As they left the last slivers of Mediterranean landscape behind them and began the climb towards the Col de la Croix-Haute, about ten kilometres before the summit they drove into a bank of white, fluffy fog. Soliman and Watchee were entering an alien sector and they observed their new surroundings with hostility and fascination."

Last month I wrote about a fascinating connection between Fred Vargas and Fernand Braudel: The superb French crime novelist and the late, great French historian shared a translator, Siân Reynolds. In a gracious reply to my fan letter, Reynolds shed further light on possible connections. She wrote that Mrs. Braudel had told her Vargas had been to see Braudel when she was starting her own career as a historian.

But the ties between the two are more than circumstantial and biographical. Braudel and Vargas had temperamental affinities as well, and those affinities strongly inform Seeking Whom He May Devour. In this novel, second of Vargas's four about Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg that have been translated into English, Vargas shares Braudel's keen and amused interest in the physical and social diversity of their homeland. The selection quoted above is a virtual illustration of Braudel's observations in The Identity of France about the country's countless pays, its distinctive micro-regions with their own economies, traditions, and even climates.

Vargas has put a plumber/musician, a wise old shepherd, and a young, all-purpose handyman in a livestock truck converted into a camper and taken them on the road through southeastern France. Their goal: Find the man or beast who has been terrorizing the countryside and the country by slaughtering sheep and the occasional human. The journey is not terribly long, but it takes the searchers through a range of climates, geography and social attitudes. With reason, one of the characters calls their odd odyssey a road movie.

And then, at a surprisingly advanced stage in the eccentric voyage, Vargas brings Adamsberg onto the scene, a symbol, despite his utterly idiosyncratic methods, of bureaucratic, Paris-centric France, another one of Braudel's many Frances and of Vargas's as well.

But Seeking Whom He May Devour is a novel, and not a geography lesson. The leisurely, late introduction of Adamsberg lets Vargas do what she does so well: build a convincing fictional world populated by sympathetic characters before the investigation gets serious. Among other things, this means that when Vargas introduces the inevitable tensions and complications and personal notes, they seem an organic part of the novel, and not mere grafted-on human interest. We know these people. And the ground is fertile for the interpersonal dynamics that help make any journey more than a mere itinerary: The plumber/musician is Adamsberg's long-ago lover, the elusive Camille.

The mystery is fully worked out, complete with red herrings and false leads, the killings suitably gruesome, the confrontations with the killer and other bad characters suitably tense. But the pleasures of seeing the travellers developing a daily routine around their rolling home are at least as great. The delights, as in any good journey, are at least as much in the travel as in reaching the destination. Or maybe even more so.
=================

The other Adamsberg novels are Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, Have Mercy on Us All, and This Night's Foul Work. The last, a translation of Dans les bois éternels, which appeared in French last year, is to be published in 2008.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A star translator of mystery and history

I took a break from crime fiction to pick up The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, by that epoch-making French historian-geographer Fernand Braudel. Braudel wrote on a grand scale (the famous longue durée), and his writing was lively, engaging and passionate, especially when he wrote about his native country.

This afternoon I made the exciting discovery that the book's English translator was Sian Reynolds, known to crime-fiction readers as the double-Dagger-winning translator of Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand and The Three Evangelists. Reynolds also translated Braudel's three-volume Civilization and Capitalism — 15th-18th Century and the two-volume The Identity of France. I recommend the latter to anyone who wants convincing that history is exciting and can take in far more than what is normally understood by the word history.

I don't know how typical Sian Reynolds' genre-hopping is in the translation and publishing businesses, but she obviously keeps good company in her work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Peter Temple wins the world's biggest crime-fiction prize

This just in: Peter Temple's The Broken Shore has won a highly deserved CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, formerly known as the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction, for best crime novel of the year. I've raved about The Broken Shore and Temple here. Other winners of awards from Britain's Crime Writers' Association include:

— Author Fred Vargas and translator Sian Reynolds, Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for Wash this Blood Clean from My Hand. This marks a repeat for the pair, who won last year for The Three Evangelists.

— Gillian Flynn and her novel Sharp Objects, winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the CWA New Blood Dagger.

Find a complete list CWA winners here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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