Fred and Ed

I posted six years ago and again in 2011 about Ed McBain's far-flung influence on other crime writers, citing tributes from such authors as Ireland's Ken Bruen, Britain's David Hewson, and Sweden's Kjell Eriksson.

Still, I was gobsmacked when doing research for a review of Fred Vargas' latest novel to find that she, too, reveres the author of the 87th Precinct mysteries. "I am reading him for the third time," she told L'Express two years ago. McBain, she said, would "write a novel with five intersecting stories, and there was no relationship between them."

Quirky, fey Fred Vargas? I thought. Tough, gritty, Ed McBain? But by God, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, the novel that was the subject of my review and the occasion of Vargas' Express interview, juggles stories big and small, bringing them beautifully to the appropriate degree of conclusion, just as McBain did in Nocturne, the best of the few 87th Precinct books I've read.

And now readers, your question: What are your favorite examples of surprising literary influence?

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(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Algeria is to France and Vietnam to the U.S. as ? is to ?

I'd decided to let Algeria lie for a while until a pair of passages in Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec made me realize Algeria must have penetrated the French consciousness and conscience the way Vietnam did in the United States.

The character in question (dead by the time the novel begins and invoked for his abominable conduct in the community and toward his family) is said to have had a bullet lodged in his head from the Algerian War, and to have been

"taken off active service and they put him into interrogations. Torturing people." 

Revelations of torture during the war shocked the French public, and the matter still comes up in occasional legal cases.  That Vargas could invoke torture and Algeria in a novel published in 2011 (English translation, 2013) suggests at least some in France are still haunted by the subject, and the character in Vargas' book said to have engaged in torture suggests that Vargas regards torture as the materialization of the worst that France has ever done and torturers as the real-life embodiment of the evil spirit always hinted at in her books.

If Algeria is France's conscience and its nightmare, if Vietnam played a similar role for the United States, what are their counterparts for other countries? And have those counterparts appeared in crime fiction?

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(Read 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