What makes a killer kill? (Fred Vargas, "Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand")

What drives a person to kill? The vast (I hope) majority of crime-fiction writers have never killed a person, and they ignore the question. Fred Vargas confronts it head on.

In Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, the protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, comes to believe he may be guilty of murder. He shares his doubts with a faithful colleague who, naturally, believes in him but, unlike most faithful colleagues, gives an explanation that goes beyond mere sentimentality and blind faith.

And you haven't any doubts?" [Adamsberg] asked.

"No."

"Why not? You don't like me, and there's a mountain of evidence stacked up against me. But you don't think I did it?"

"No. You're not the sort of man who would kill someone."

"How do you know?"

Retancourt pursed her lips slightly, seeming to hesitate.

"Well, let's just say that it wouldn't interest you enough."

Later, the colleague offers a fuller explanation to the abstracted, intuitive, brilliantly successful Adamsberg:

"I admired your flair of course, everyone did, but not the air of detachment it seemed to give you, the way you disregarded anything your deputies said, since you only half-listened to them anyway. I didn't like your isolation, your high-handed indifference. ... you ought to listen when I say you didn't murder anyone. To kill, you need to be emotionally involved with other people, you need to get drawn into their troubles and even be obsessed by what they represent. Killing means interfering with some kind of bond, an excessive reaction, a sort of mingling with someone else. So that the other person doesn't exist as themselves, but as something that belongs to you, that you can treat as a victim. I don't think you're remotely capable of that."

How that works as psychology, I don't much know or care, and neither does Vargas. Hers is no psychological crime novel. If anything, it's a philosophical one and is the better for that. I mean, haven't we all had enough narration from the point of view of the psychopath or the man or woman driven to kill by a traumatic childhood? Isn't it nice to have a bit of analysis by someone other than the killer? Isn't it especially nice when, as in this novel, the killer turns out to be an obsessed sociopath of a particularly extravagant kind, and all we know of him is what he says in his brief appearances and what others think about him?

That's just one way Vargas makes Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand so fresh and such a pleasure to read. Others are a sly wit, a sympathetic and just sentimental enough view of some elderly characters, and some delightful takes on the cultural conflict between French Canadians and French when Adamsberg and his colleagues fly to Quebec for a seminar on DNA profiling. Vargas, a medieval historian and archaeologist, also manages gracefully to work those interests into the story.

There was an outcry two years ago when Britain's Crime Writers’ Association split its main CWA Gold Dagger award into two prizes, one for English-language crime fiction and one for translated crime. One happy result is that the CWA this year was able to honor two superlatively good crime novels: Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand,with the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger, and Peter Temple's The Broken Shore, with the Duncan Lawrie Dagger.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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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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translation

Kick this ball clean from my hand: Which crime novel best represents the World Cup?

(At left, a blue vuvuzela. See and hear the Vuvuzela Orchestra performing "Shosholoza.")

France made it into this year's soccer World Cup on the strength of Thierry Henry's illegal hand ball against Ireland (right).

That's why I liked a commenter's invocation of Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in my post about the World Cup of Crime Fiction.

Henry is French; so is Vargas. Henry committed an illicit act; Vargas' title invokes the cleansing one's self of the taint of such an act. And the hand – what a hoot!

That makes Vargas' book the crime novel of the World Cup so far. What other books deserve the honor?

To help you decide, here's Jeff VanderMeer's World Cup of Fiction, to which this post owes its existence.

***

Switzerland beat Spain Wednesday in the World Cup's biggest upset so far.

That was soccer; in the World Cup of Crime Fiction, Friedrich Glauser's diving header past Spanish goalkeeper Manuel Vázquez Montalbán plunged the food-loving, politically committed, Barcelona FC-supporting creator of Pepe Carvalho into a lengthy bout of dissipated introspection. Glauser displayed great compassion for the losers.

(Click here for P.J. Brooke's look at the past and present of Spanish crime fiction.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

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.)

========

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

The Detectives Beyond Borders top eighteen (or nineteen), part I

What’s so great about the decimal number system? Who says base ten rules? And do the Simpsons keep top-eight lists because they have eight fingers rather than our ten?

I can no more trim my list of 2007’s top crime reading to ten than I can restrict it to novels or to fiction, for that matter. So, here's part one of a list of novels, stories, plays and histories that made my crime-fiction reading interesting in 2007.

Nice Try by Shane Maloney – At least as funny as the other novels in this Australian writer’s Murray Whelan series but, it seems to me, more intricately (and tightly) plotted.

Fast One by Paul Cain – This novel by the most enigmatic of the American pulpsters is fast, witty, hard and, perhaps most impressive for a book published in 1932, not at all dated in its language.

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer – A group entry of the first four books in Colfer's series about a young criminal genius, plus Half Moon Investigations, about a 12-year-old private eye. The books are funny, smart, and decidedly not just for young-adult readers.

"Bloody Windsor" by Gwendoline Butler and “An Urban Legend Puzzle” by Norizuki Rintaro – These two stories, the first from The Oxford Book of Detective Stories: An International Selection, the second from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's Passport to Crime collection, make the list because they surprised me with little acts of authorial magic. Butler sets the scene forcefully at the start and thereby avoids the need to clutter the rest of the story with detail of its eighteenth-century setting. Norizuki, part of the "New Traditionalism" movement in Japanese crime writing, has written a story true to the old tradition of the puzzle mystery yet thoroughly modern in setting and feel.

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand by Fred Vargas – Funny and written with a deep sympathy for its characters. This and the French author's other three novels published to date in English translation give quirkiness a good name.

Snobbery With Violence: English Crime Stories And Their Audience – Colin Watson’s highly opinionated social history of English crime fiction will make you laugh just as I suspect it made its original audience squirm in 1971. And you may be surprised by what Watson says about George Orwell.

Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland – This debut, winner of Australia’s Ned Kelly Award for best first crime novel, does a number of things well. It’s a glimpse into a fascinating, exotic, though thoroughly contemporary world, it’s a convincing and well-plotted amateur-sleuth tale, and it’s funny, with a sympathy for its characters something like that Fred Vargas has for hers.

How about you, gentle readers? If you can still remember 2007, tell me about your favorite crime reading from that year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

More "Wash This Blood ... "

I'm still reading Fred Vargas' Dagger-winning Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, and I'm not at all embarrassed or disappointed to be reading a bit more slowly than usual. This is a book to be savored. Among the pleasures of its first 222 pages:

1) Vargas works her protagonist, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, into a predicament similar to those of a string of men later jailed for murder — wrongly jailed, Adamsberg believes. The similarities are so obvious that even I realized it, yet Adamsberg does not, at least not right away.

Weak plotting on Vargas' part? I thought so for about a tenth of a second. Then I realized that this is Vargas' small, subtle way of making a point that other writers would hit the reader over the head with: Her protagonist is not perfect. He has blind spots, weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

2) She puts a forthright, touching declaration of self-knowledge into the mouth of an Adamsberg colleague, then turns it into a declaration of strength:

"You didn't seem to be taking any notice, just sitting in a corner, looking bored."

"That was an act," said Retancourt, pouring out two more cups of coffee. "Men pay no attention to a fat, plain woman."

"That's not at all what I meant, lieutenant."

"But it's exactly what I meant, sir," she said, waving away the objection. "They don't bother looking at her, she's just part of the furniture, and they actually forget she's there. I depend on that. Add a bored expression and hunched shoulders, and you're sure to be able to see everything without being seen. Not everyone can get away with it, and it's served me well in the past."

3) Vargas gets the distance between Montreal and Hull, Quebec right.

More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Fred Vargas
French crime fiction

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

Here's a better idea

Instead of discussing what I didn't have time for on the radio Wednesday, here are the notes I carried with me into the studio. I guess this would have been a bit much to get to in one hour.

Listen here to hear what we did get to.
==============================

Latest Here on Earth notes
Date: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 12:06 AM

Seicho Matsumoto: Inspector Imanishi Investigates, Points and Lines. Trains and their role in Japanese society.

Jakob Arjouni: Plight of Turkish gastarbeiter in Germany.

Matt Beynon Rees: The Arabic review that explained an investigator's job is to find out the truth.

Post-Troubles and Troubles off-shoots in Northern Ireland: How does one cope? a) Garbhan Downey b) Adrian McKinty, who penetrates into the heart of America. c) Brian McGilloway, who sets novels on the border, Borderlands. d) Stuart Neville, Ghosts of Belfast.

Arnaldur Indriðason: Takes superb advantage of setting in Jar City, The Draining Lake. "One problem for Icelandic crime writers is that we have almost no crime."

Manuel Vazquez Montalban: Has a private cook, Biscuter. Was jailed under Franco. The Buenos Aires Quintet. (Political. Mediterranean. Food.)

Andrea Camilleri: Salvo Montalbano (named for Montalban) loves food, prickly but increasingly tender as the series goes on. Excursion to Tindari, Smell of the Night, Patience of the Spider. (cf. Simenon) (Political. Mediterranean. Food.)

Jean-Claude Izzo: Loves food, music, poetry, Marseilles. Predicted the riots in the banlieues. The Marseilles Trilogy (Political. Mediterranean. Food.)

Humor and Scandinavians: Jo Nesbø (The Redbreast, Devil's Star, Nemesis); Håkan Nesser (The Return); Karin Fossum (He Who Fears the Wolf)

Qiu Xiaolong: Death of a Red Heroine. Slow buildup through pollution of Shanghai. Anti-climax of the perps' hasty execution.

Canadian setting and the border: John McFetridge (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Dirty Sweet); Howard Shrier (Buffalo Jump, High Chicago); Boldness of a Canadian setting: Sandra Ruttan: What Burns Within. Arson. Ensemble cast.

Fred Vargas: Slow buildup. Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand.

Pierre Magnan: Rural life, slow pace, neuroses, acceptance. Death in the Truffle Wood.

Irish writers and Americans: Ken Bruen ("All my influences are American. That's how to I learned to read. That's how I learned to write.") Declan Burke loves Chandler. Brian McGilloway on the American West. Declan Hughes loves Margaret Millar, Ross MacDonald.

Yasmina Khadra: (Army officer, self-imposed exile, wrote in French because his teacher encouraged him)

Bill James, Peter Temple: Best prose stylists.

Clive James:

" . . . there are only so many storylines and patterns of conflict. The only workable solution has been to shift the reader's involvement from the center to the periphery: to the location. In most of the crime novels coming out now, it's a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks."

Misc. exotic settings: Eliot Pattison (Tibet). Double outsider: Exiled Han Chinese prisoner in Tibet. Michael Walters (Mongolia)

Translation: Stephen Sartarelli on the richness of Camilleri's language. Sian Reynolds on translating wordplay. Mike Mitchell on Glauser's dialects. Don Barlett on Vibes gate. Janwillem van de Wetering: Translating canals' names to show their silliness.

Crime fiction crossed borders from the beginning:

"One should remember also that crime fiction was international from its beginnings. Poe's C. Auguste Dupin was a French crime solver created by an American. This is no mere accident of history. There is reason to believe, as one Poe scholar says, that an older society such as France was more prepared than the young United States to accept a writer who probed the dark side the way Poe did."

Chinese crime plays that became novels in the 18th century. Robert Van Gulik.

Crime fiction as a key to history: Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels

Crime fiction as a key to politics: Jean-Patrick Manchette's political noir (The Prone Gunman, Three to Kill.); Helene Tursten, Kjell Eriksson

Exotic locations (with respect!): Colin Cotterill and Dr. Siri.

Timothy Hallinan: Struggles as an outsider.

Brazil: Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Leighton Gage

Publishers: Bitter Lemon, Serpent's Tail, Quercus, Harvill Secker. Vertical (Japan, Korea)

Dominique Manotti: Corporate villains.

Stieg Larsson + Michael Jackson: Together in Borders window

#

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Fred Vargas, queen of the slow fuse

A concerned reader wondered whether last week's post about great first lines in crime fiction may have overemphasized the importance of a whiz-bang opening. "I've trawled some of the novels I've read recently," she wrote, "and realised that the opening lines were not great, although the novels were brilliant. We're all told you need a good hook to open, but could that hook really be more than just the first line, perhaps the first page?"

That's a valid concern. In fact, the question did not go far enough. A hook, in Fred Vargas' case, can be not the first line, not the first page, but the first chapter — or chapters. Breaking from my usual practice, I posted a comment two weeks ago after reading just the opening chapter of Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. I was astonished that Vargas opened that novel with the protagonist and his top assistant contemplating and fretting over a broken water heater and an upcoming forensics conference. The site of the conference turns out to be a key plot element, but the reader has no way of knowing this at the time. The chapter works because the characters are so interesting and the situation so odd.

Have Mercy On Us All burns with a similarly slow fuse. The flics, or police, don't make the scene until the fourth chapter. When they do, the words get right at the heart, not of the plot, but of the protagonist: "`I wonder," mused Chief Inspector Adamsberg ... '"

Those six words sum up Vargas' approach. The first three chapters are full of odd occurrences and characters surprisingly fully realized considering how "quirky" they are. But then come those six key words. Adamsberg is impatient with procedure and prone to making intuitive connections that often come to him on the long walks he loves. His wandering and wondering and musing drive the novel and drive his loyal, logical second-in-command, Danglard, nuts.

And now, back to the book, to see how Vargas works her magic. The tentative verdict is that she has as sure a grip on what she wants her protagonist to be as any author I can think of.
====================

If you're up to it, think of some novels that are memorable for their slow buildups. Then tell me what they are and why they worked for you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Fred Vargas
French crime fiction

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

Technorati tags:
Fred Vargas
French crime fiction

Fred Vargas is positively medieval

I knew Vargas was a medieval historian and archaeologist. More recently I read that she had done research on the epidemiology of the Black Death. The latter certainly figures prominently in Have Mercy on Us All. In Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, protagonist Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg's recurring fantasy of stuffing Strasbourg Cathedral, one of the great medieval buildings, full of noxious beasts is redolent of plague imagery from medieval art.

In Have Mercy ... , a town crier and an impoverished keeper of a boardinghouse team up in the opening chapters to investigate puzzling messages that keep turning up in the letterbox where the crier gathers his news. The two have a testy relationship and, in their contrasting turns of mind and their squabbling, are a kind of humorous echo of the intuitive Adamsberg and his erudite, analytical lieutenant, Danglard.

It's tempting to think that Vargas took that echo-in-miniature idea from the Middle Ages. Medieval painters, sculptors, manuscript illuminators and embroiderers loved to populate their work with marginal figures that fill space, provide decoration, or, as in this example from the Bayeux Tapestry, echo, supplement, or comment on the main action.

None of this is necessary to enjoy Vargas' writing, but it's fun to think about and just might give some insight into her technique.

© 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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Crime fiction in translation

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.
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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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French crime fiction

Bill Shakespeare, sleuth / A question for readers

Like crime stories beyond number, Hamlet begins at night. Like fictional sleuths beyond counting, its protagonist sets a trap to snare a murderer ("The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.")

Hamlet, like Philip Marlowe, is prone to bitter jokes, and, like Lovejoy, Keller, Quiller and Parker, he has just one name. He goes undercover, in a sense, to impersonate a madman. And you can keep all your self-doubting Kurt Wallanders, Harry Holes or John Rebuses; Hamlet was there first.

Shakespeare has long inspired crime writers. Murder Most Foul is a line from Hamlet (Act I, Scene v, Line 27). And does the title of Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand seem familiar? Macbeth says those words after slaying Duncan.

And now, dear readers, what have I missed? What other crime writers have taken titles and other cues from Shakespeare? I'll start you off: Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon paraphrases Prospero in The Tempest when he calls the black bird "the stuff that dreams are made of." Now, help me build this list.

(image from http://www.leoyan.com/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/YOUNG/index.html)



© Peter Rozovsky 2007



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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.

*

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

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 vs. Quebec rivalry?

A fellow blogger tells me that some Montreal members of online reading groups were bothered by aspects of Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. I've been unable to track down their complaints, but Vargas does not shy away from the cultural friction that ensues when Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his Paris colleagues fly to Quebec for a forensics conference.

Among other things, the novel's scariest character other than the killer is a high-level French Canadian police officer portrayed as strict, manipulative, and even a bit sadistic in his psychological toying with suspects. In addition, French Canadian readers might not have been thrilled that a good Quebec officer who helps Adamsberg is rewarded with promotion to be closer to his girlfriend — in predominantly Anglophone Toronto. The novel also offers observations about mutual mistrust between French Canadians and French and about typical French Canadian names that don't occur in France — Ginette, Laliberté and, if I recall correctly, Filibert are three of them. It's all rather gentle stuff, I'd say.

In any case, such intercultural suspicion may be a kind of turnabout from a previous Vargas novel, Seeking Whom He May Devour. In that book, a Canadian naturalist working among wolves in southeastern France is less than impressed with the humans, especially when they begin to suspect a werewolf, rather than a conventional animal, in a series of sheep killings.

"They're saying this time it's not an ordinary animal."

"Not ordinary?"

"A different kind of beast. Bigger. A force of nature, with a monster's jaw. Abnormal, like. In a word, a ghoul."

"Pull the other one."

"That's what they're saying."

Johnstone was stunned. He shook his blond locks.

"Your bloody backward country," he said after a
pause, "is populated by nothing but bird-brained yokels."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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French crime fiction

Fred Vargas

Up until very recently, I'd never read a single chapter by this double Dagger winner. Now, I have read a single chapter, the first of Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, the novel for which Vargas and translator Siân Reynolds recently received their second succesive Duncan Lawrie International Dagger. This attention-grabbing opening begins with Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg contemplating a broken central-heating system. He hopes to have it repaired, of course, but mostly he thinks about himself, the heater, and the place they share in the universe.

Adamsberg shivers with his second-in-command, Capitaine Danglard, a precise, knowledgeable officer, perhaps too precise and knowledgeable for the apparently intuitive Adamsberg. The two share personal secrets, and they have opposing approaches to an upcoming police seminar in Quebec. And that, for all practical purposes, is the chapter. There is barely a hint, if any at all, of the cases that will constitute the novel. The chapter reads more like the opening scene of a two-man show, all the emphasis on contrasts between the two characters. I have never read an opening chapter like this before in a crime novel.

© 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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Crime fiction in translation

All about translation

I've written from time to time about issues that arise in translation, from Siân Reynolds' decision to leave out mutual misunderstandings of French idioms between French and Canadian characters in her translation of Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand to Shane Maloney's vivid thoughts on making Australian expressions available to American readers to an excellent article in which leading crime-fiction translators talk about what they do.

With a hat tip to Nearly Nothing But Novels, I've found a blog all about translation. Life in Translation's author works mostly on Spanish-English translations, but she offers general thoughts on the art and practice of translation, as wel, and, in a comment, some thoughts on the Mexican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Crime fiction in translation