Fred Vargas "The Ghost Riders of Ordebec "

Here’s an exceptionally strong case for reading a series in order. While you could (I guess) read The Ghost Riders of Ordebec without having opened the previous episodes in a quite wonderful series there are two very strong arguments against that.

The first lies in the fact that with Ghost Riders we’ve come to the point where there are no titles written in French in the translate these queue. That means we’ve probably got to wait for French medieval historian and archaeologist Frederique Audoin-Rouzeau to morph herself into Fred Vargas, spend three weeks turning out another Adamsberg title and a further six months on the editing process (source here) and then wait for translator Sian Reynolds to do her thing and render the title into English.

Given that factor, those unfamiliar with the eccentricities of Commissaire Adamsberg and his misanthropic bunch of misfits would be best advised to go back to 2009’s The Chalk Circle Man (originally published in France eighteen years earlier) and working on through Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999/2004), Have Mercy on Us All (2001/2003), Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand (2004/2007), This Night’s Foul Work (2006/2008) and An Uncertain Place (2008/2011).

Looking at that little sequence one can expect the next title, assuming one were to appear on the French best sellers’ list some time this year (two years since L'armée furieuse appeared in French, two years’ lead time to transform the furious army into Ghost Riders) to appear on our shelves some time around 2015, so you’ll have plenty of time to work your way through them.

The other argument involves both the thoroughly quixotic Commissaire Adamsberg, and the team he’s built around him (you won’t find an outfit like this just coalescing) at the Serious Crimes Squad. His (mostly) loyal lieutenant Danglard, the depressive alcoholic walking encyclopaedia and single parent, Danglard's nemesis Veyrenc who delivers off the cuff remarks in rhyming couplets and the statuesque Violette Retancourt whose role this time around is largely confined to caring for a wounded pigeon aren’t the sort of characters you’re likely to come across anywhere else.

A sequential reading helps make sense of the back story with those individuals being added to the fold gradually as the series evolves.

The latest addition to the outfit, though he’s not an actual member of the squad is Adamsberg’s recently discovered twenty-eight-year-old son, Zerk emerged in An Uncertain Truth and one tends to suspect there’s someone on the periphery of The Ghost Riders who’ll end up being added to the cast at some point in the future. It’s that sort of series.

When a fragile, panic-stricken little old lady named Valentine Vendermot travels to Paris from a village in the Calvados region of Normandy to tell Adamsberg (she’s quite definite who she wants to talk to) about the peculiar affliction that's befallen Ordebec she’s not quite sure she wants to enter the building that houses the Serious Crimes Squad.

Seated in a nearby cafe, discussing his future with Veyrenc, who’s facing a reenlistment deadline after a brief investigation of a death involving suffocation through the agency of sliced bread, Adamsberg sees her loitering, knows who she’s there to see and ushers her inside. For any other protagonist this would come across as far fetched and unlikely in the extreme, with Adamsberg it’s pretty much par for the course.

The old woman’s daughter Lina Vendermot has had a vision of the Furious Army, a ghostly horde of phantom riders from the Middle Ages lead by Lord Hellequin who allegedly search out people with serious crimes on their conscience. Those who appear in their clutches tend to disappear and later turn up gruesomely dead.

This latest sighting had them carrying three victims Lina can identify and one she can’t. One of the three has already disappeared and the mother pleads with Adamsberg to help since three more lives are on the line and her daughter’s likely to be blamed for inciting the deaths.

The man who has disappeared is a notoriously cruel hunter, and the local gendarmerie are inclined to dismiss the whole thing as silly superstition, which explains the old woman wanting to enlist Adamsberg’s services. Danglard, predictably, knows all about the furious army, This ancient cavalcade causing havoc in the countryside is damaged. The horses and their riders have no flesh. It's an army of the dead is his explanation, though he needs a minute to recall thirteenth century details he’s able to cite precisely.

Again, in another setting, this would be remarkable. Here, it’s par for the course.

Adamsberg has his own reasons for wanting to get involved. Apart from the morning’s strangulation a fabulously wealthy Parisian industrialist has been torched in his car in circumstances that point directly towards a known serial arsonist affectionately nicknamed MoMo and while he’s the obvious suspect Adamsberg believes he’s innocent and is willing to go to great lengths to prove it.

This belief is based on traces of petrol on MoMo’s bootlaces, something that doesn’t add up because of the way MoMo would tie the laces. Again, remarkable elsewhere, routine for Adamsberg.

MoMo, of course, having been taken into custody, needs to escape, something Adamsberg arranges through the unwitting agency of his narcoleptic offsider Mercadet, and having escaped needs somewhere to go to ground. Given the fact that the police will check MoMo’s known haunts, the best place to hide him is obviously chez Adamsberg, where he can be monitored by Zerk.

 So Adamsberg heads for Calvados, where he discovers the body of the man who’s gone missing and sets about attempting to ensure the safety of the others who’ve been sighted in the clutches of the horde, becoming embroiled in local politics as the prophecy seems to be being fulfilled. He strikes up a friendship with the elderly Léone, who knows the secrets that lie behind Ordebec's cast of oddball characters and when she becomes the victim of a decidedly non-spectral culprit, Adamsberg becomes determined to solve the mystery, aided and abetted by his own regular cast of oddballs.

That’s the point where we draw the veil over proceedings, except to note the presence of long-running feuds, obscure aristocrats, unpleasant stepsons, secret marriages, six fingered hands, unplanned amputations, crossbows, speeding express trains, men made of clay, sugar lumps and Hebbeaud the injured pigeon that sleeps (and leaves deposits) in Adamsberg's shoe.

 Like everything else Vargas has done The Ghost Riders of Ordebec is original, eccentric, with a sly, understated sense of humour lurking below the crimes, dark fables and supernatural elements that turn out to have predictably human explanations, though the explanations themselves are rarely predictable. While it’s not the best place to start with Vargas' work and her inimitable character it’s a joy to read and left this particular reader trying to figure out how to fill in the lengthy lead time until the next instalment appears.

Fred Vargas "Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand"

Taking a glance along the bookshelves there are a number of series represented in (almost) their entirety, and in most cases they're, predictably, based around a central character who, in most cases, has some significant degree of eccentricity.

It's easy enough to base a series around a character who's basically a decent bloke (in most cases the key character's male, with Alafair Burke's books the significant exception to the rule) but that means he needs something to add an element of interest and continuity through the series. Peter Robinson's D.I. Banks, for example, has his music while Stephen Booth's Ben Cooper has his family and the on-going prickly interaction with DS Diane Fry, who has her own issues to deal with.

But then you have the central characters who have their, shall we say, eccentricities. James Lee Burke's Dave Robichaux and Burke's other key characters have their interactions between alcohol and their pasts, all of which have elements that are going to drive them. George Pelecanos has an ongoing and intersecting circle of Washington-based sociopaths, most of them with an interest in music and a background of substance issues if not actual abuse.

Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen has his quirks as far as diet and other matters are concerned as he tries to manoeuvre himself into a comfortable sinecure, something that he never quite manages to achieve.
There are a few of them that are pretty much out there. Kinky Friedman and the Greenwich Village Irregulars, Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano and his merry men and Colin Cotterill's Dr Siri and his social circle being prime examples, but when it comes to characters that are way out there where the buses don't run there aren't too many that are further out there than Fred Vargas' Superintendent Jean Baptiste Adamsberg.

Adamsberg's the leader of a ragtag twenty-seven strong assembly of oddballs, including the alcoholic single father and walking encyclopedia Danglard, the formidably substantial Violette Retancourt and a variety of other individuals who all seem to have some degree of obsessive compulsive disorder with walk on roles for his on and off girlfriend, plumber and musician Camille, mother of his son and recurring source of strange situations.

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand is the fifth in the Adamsberg series, following on not long after This Night's Foul Work. After a few weeks off work, a new home which may or may not be haunted by a ghost who may or may not only have it in for women there are a couple of new players as Adamsberg engages in the demarcation dispute with the drug squad that's the starting point of another highly coincidental plot line.

He needs an ally to keep the investigation into the possibly drug-related deaths of two large men within his own Serious Crime Squad bailiwick, and the most obvious ally is leading pathologist Ariane Lagarde. There's a back story to their interaction here, involving a clash of opinions over a previous case Ariane had categorized as suicide which Adamsberg, correctly as it turned out, saw as murder.

There's also a back story to the newest member of Adamsberg's team "The New Recruit"  whose home in the Pyrenees is the village next door to Adamsberg's. Eight-year-old Veyrenc was attacked by a gang of four toughs from that village while a fifth boy looked on, and it's soon obvious that the on-looker was Adamsberg.

THe attack left Veyrenc with physical as well as mental scars, and his family background has delivered an extraordinary ability to speak in alexandrines, rhyming lines of twelve syllables that were a staple of Baroque German literature, modern French poetry and English drama before Marlowe and Shakespeare. In another series this would be remarkable, here it's an almost regulation personal quirk.

There's no obvious link between the are they or are they not drug related deaths under investigation and shootings of stags in Normandy, and Adamsberg only encounters those incidents because he's called to babysit young Tom while Camille plays cello in an orchestral concert. The Norman villagers outraged at these seemingly senseless acts have their own foibles, as you'd expect, and Adamsberg's drawn into investigating aspects of those killings which, as readers familiar with the quirks of Vargas' plot lines would have come to expect, turn out to be related to this other case.

The most likely suspect seems to be a recently-escaped elderly district nurse, jailed for more than thirty killings of old people and possibly out for revenge on Adamsberg, who, predictably, cracked  the case and his associated. There's also the possibility that she's gathering the ingredients for a potion that will deliver eternal life, and the deaths that kicked the story off would seem to be part of that. There are a number of seemingly accidental deaths of Norman virgins whose graves have subsequently been disturbed, more than likely by the two men whose bodies Adamsberg wants to keep out of the clutches of the drug squad, as part of the process of gathering those ingredients.

That quest for the eternal elixir might also explain the mysterious disappearance of Violette Retancourt, a matter that is resolved when her unconscious body is located by Snowball the tracker cat.

It would be quite possible to go further into the intricacies and interlinkings as Adamsberg goes about another instinctive investigation, but out of consideration for the reader, I'm inclined to draw a veil over those matters, pausing only, on the way out, to point out that Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand is another worthy addition to a series that will eventually find its way, complete, onto Hughesy's bookshelves. Between public libraries in Bowen and southport and book shop purchases I've read the remainder of the series, and as we keep our eyes peeled for the forthcoming An Uncertain Place and subsequent volumes there's definitely a place for rereading their precedents, which means they need to find their way onto the shelves, don't they?

Fred Vargas "An Uncertain Place"

Towards the end of An Uncertain Place, having cracked the case and tied the ends together, Commissaire Adamsberg phones the Serb translator who has helped sort things out. Asked about plans for the future, the translator replies that he's off to a conference and will be back on the straight and narrow which as you know does not exist and is neither straight nor narrow.

Which is, looking at it, a remarkably accurate summary of both existence and your typical Adamsberg story.

In both cases there's an apparent progression through a seemingly continuous narrative which simultaneously unfolds and jumps from place to place without apparent rhyme or reason as influences you thought were unrelated turn out to be intertwined.

You can, of course, take most detective novels and reduce them to a straightforward formulaic plot line. Detective is presented with challenging case and solves the mystery which turns out to have an unexpected element or consequence.

The first thing your average writer will do is to throw that plot line into an environment with a group of characters whose interactions are going to keep things going and add subplots and other intriguing influences to the mix.

Fred Vargas (the nom de plume of French historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audouin-Rouzeau), as anyone who has read her fiction knows, does all that at the start and then takes things off in directions that increasingly defy your expectations even when, having read everything you've been able to get your hands on. you don't actually have any.

My invariable reaction to an Adamsberg story is to scratch my head and ask myself how the (expletive deleted) could anyone come up with that?

For a start, having noted the rise of a substantial genre involving (teenage? dunno, haven't actually read, not really interested) vampires I hadn't anticipated reading any of it since that whole Nosferatu/Vlad the Impaler thing doesn't really float my boat, yet here we are wandering off to not-quite-Transylvania to track down a case that seemingly involves interactions between and among the undead and their legacy.

Then there's the strange coincidence of people who've got it in for Adamsberg who turn out to be related in unexpected ways, and not necessarily related to Adamsberg.

Or not. As the case may be.

The key point is, I think, that when you pick up an Adamsberg novel you know you're headed for strange territory, so it's a case of suspending logic and any set of expectations and settle down for the ride.

Put bluntly, this time around Adamsberg starts off at a a three-day conference in London where he encounters (shock! horror!) a macabre, bizarre and brutal case. Returning to Paris he encounters a second case which turns out to be related to the first one and needs an excursion to Serbia to tie the elements together.

Oh, yes, and the whole thing centres around the undead and represents the culmination of themes that run back a couple of centuries.

Along the way you know you're going to encounter an extravagance of eccentricities, and once again they're present in spades. Adamsberg, for a start, blithely wanders through a conference conducted in a language he doesn't speak while his translator, the encyclopedic Danglard becomes smitten by a female participant whose name appears to be Abstract. Apart from his lack of English, there's Adamsberg's inability to remember precise detail, so New Scotland Yard's Inspector Radstock becomes Stock, and London's baroque old Highgate Cemetery becomes Higg-gate. It's all in the detail, you see.

The starting point for the ride, once the scene has been set, is a collection of seventeen shoes, each containing a severed foot, apparently seeking admission to the cemetery. Danglard notices that some of the shoes are French, but Adamsberg cautions him against getting involves. Let the English handle it, and all that.

Back in Paris, there's a brutal murder in suburbia where the victim's body has been pulverized by a miscellaneous assortment of sharp, blunt and powered devices to the point where there's nothing left to identify him except for traces of DNA and there's some sort of logic behind the apparently random scattering of body parts around the crime scene.

The victim, a rich semi-retired legal-journalist who was not quite cordially disliked by almost everybody, including his son (who describes him as chateau-bottled shit), has left most of his fortune to his gardener, who happens to have a criminal record involving a number of violent offences, which naturally puts him straight into the frame.

Characteristically, Adamsberg doesn't think he did it and isn't inclined to expend too much energy when he escapes, having managed to disable two police guards.

Checks reveal a similar death in Austria, where the killer has been labelled Zerquetscher, the Crusher, an epithet Adamsberg diminished to Zerk, who eventually arrives in Adamsberg's home, claiming to be his son.

These things happen all the time when Adamsberg's about.

There are also the regulation complications among Adamsberg's squad, with Danglard distracted by Abstract and the usually efficient Inspector Mordent distracted by his teenage daughter, who's facing serious criminal charges and provides an excuse for someone to get at her father.

That someone, it seems, has contacts among the upper echelons of the French political and legal establishment and is in a position to conceal the identity of the culprit and simultaneously destroy Adamsberg’s career.

Faced with that threat, Adamsberg makes himself scarce, heading to Serbia and a village close to the Romanian border, which turns out to be the victim's ancestral home and gives Vargas the chance to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of vampire-related folklore.

The sojourn also gives Adamsberg the chance to tie things together, though the vital clue, as usually happens, passes you unnoticed until the Aha! moment, when, of course, you find yourself wondering why you didn't notice that at the time.

Or at least, on this occasion wrapped up in the developing narrative, I did.

And that, I think is the point. An Adamsberg story develops throws up a bewildering range of apparently unrelated elements as Jean-Baptiste and his colleagues set about their investigations with Adamsberg adopting a scatter-gun approach and seemingly investigating everything that might be relevant and quite a bit that probably isn't but, in some cases, turns out to be.

If you're a fan of logical development through forensic analysis and standard procedures there's every chance Fred Vargas isn't quite your cup of tea. On the other hand, each of the Adamsberg stories has rolled along quite marvellously as a remarkable character and his inimitable squad wander through a surreal world that parallels reality but doesn't quite manage to exist within it.

An eighth title, L'armée furieuse is already out in France. Hopefully we're not looking at a repetition of the three years An Uncertain Place spent in translation. though these matters cannot and definitely should not be hurried.

Fred Vargas "This Night's Foul Work"

Taking a glance along the bookshelves there are a number of series represented in (almost) their entirety, and in most cases they're, predictably, based around a central character who, in most cases, has some significant degree of eccentricity.

It's easy enough to base a series around a character who's basically a decent bloke (in most cases the key character's male, with Alafair Burke's books the significant exception to the rule) but that means he needs something to add an element of interest and continuity through the series.

Peter Robinson's D.I. Banks, for example, has his music while Stephen Booth's Ben Cooper has his family and the on-going prickly interaction with DS Diane Fry, who has her own issues to deal with.

But then you have the central characters who have their, shall we say, eccentricities.

James Lee Burke's Dave Robichaux and Burke's other key characters have their interactions between alcohol and their pasts, all of which have elements that are going to drive them.

George Pelecanos has an ongoing and intersecting circle of Washington-based sociopaths, most of them with an interest in music and a background of substance issues if not actual abuse.

Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen has his quirks as far as diet and other matters are concerned as he tries to manoeuvre himself into a comfortable sinecure, something that he never quite manages to achieve.

There are a few of them that are pretty much out there.

Kinky Friedman and the Greenwich Village Irregulars, Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano and his merry men and Colin Cotterill's Dr Siri and his social circle being prime examples, but when it comes to characters that are way out there where the buses don't run there aren't too many that are further out there than Fred Vargas' Superintendent Jean Baptiste Adamsberg.

Adamsberg's the leader of a ragtag twenty-seven strong assembly of oddballs, including the alcoholic single father and walking encyclopedia Danglard, the formidably substantial Violette Retancourt and a variety of others who all have some degree of obsessive compulsive disorder with walk on roles for his on and off girlfriend, plumber and musician Camille, mother of his son and recurring source of strange situations.

This Night's Foul Work is the fifth in the Adamsberg series, following on not long after Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand. After a few weeks off work, a new home which may or may not be haunted by a ghost who may or may not only have it in for women there are a couple of new players as Adamsberg engages in the demarcation dispute with the drug squad that's the starting point of another highly coincidental plot line.

He needs an ally to keep the investigation into the possibly drug-related deaths of two large men within his own Serious Crime Squad bailiwick, and the most obvious ally is leading pathologist Ariane Lagarde. There's a back story to their interaction here, involving a clash of opinions over a previous case Ariane had categorized as suicide which Adamsberg, correctly as it turned out, saw as murder.

There's also a back story to the newest member of Adamsberg's team The New Recruit whose home in the Pyrenees is the village next door to Adamsberg's. Eight-year-old Veyrenc was attacked by a gang of four toughs from that village while a fifth boy looked on, and it's soon obvious the on-looker was Adamsberg.

The attack left Veyrenc with physical as well as mental scars, and his family background has delivered an extraordinary ability to speak in alexandrines, rhyming lines of twelve syllables that were a staple of Baroque German literature, modern French poetry and English drama before Marlowe and Shakespeare. In another series this would be remarkable, here it's an almost regulation personal quirk.

There's no obvious link between the are they or are they not drug related? deaths under investigation and shootings of stags in Normandy, and Adamsberg only encounters those incidents because he's called to babysit young Tom while Camille plays cello in an orchestral concert.

The Norman villagers outraged at these seemingly senseless acts have their own foibles, as you'd expect, and Adamsberg's drawn into investigating aspects of those killings which, as readers familiar with the quirks of Vargas' plot lines would have come to expect, turn out to be related to this other case.

The most likely suspect seems to be a recently-escaped elderly district nurse, jailed for more than thirty killings of old people and possibly out for revenge on Adamsberg, who, predictably, cracked  the case. There's also the possibility  she's gathering the ingredients for a potion that will deliver eternal life, and the deaths that kicked the story off would seem to be part of that. There are seemingly accidental deaths of Norman virgins whose graves have  been disturbed, more than likely by the two men whose bodies Adamsberg wants to keep out of the clutches of the drug squad, as part of the process of gathering those ingredients.

That quest for the eternal elixir might also explain the mysterious disappearance of possibly-virginal Violette Retancourt, a matter that is resolved when her unconscious body is located by Snowball the tracker cat.

It would be quite possible to go further into the intricacies and interlinkings as Adamsberg goes about another instinctive investigation, but out of consideration for the reader, I'm inclined to draw a veil over those matters, pausing only, on the way out, to point out that This Night's Foul Work is a worthy addition to a series that will eventually find its way, complete, onto Hughesy's bookshelves.

Between public libraries in Bowen and southport and book shop purchases I've read the remainder of the series, and as we keep our eyes peeled for An Uncertain Place and subsequent volumes there's definitely a place for rereading their precedents, which means they need to find their way onto the shelves, don't they?

Fred Vargas "Seelking Whom He May Devour"

While you expect your fictional detectives to have the odd quirky foible, Fred Vargas' Commissaire Adamsberg takes the biscuit when it comes to extending quirks and foibles into genuine eccentricity.

Vargas (a.k.a. French historian, archaeologist and authority on the epidemiology of the Black Death and bubonic plague Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) seems to specialise in odd characters, with her other series The Three Evangelists involving three historians, specialising respectively in prehistory, medieval life, the Great War (an odd mixture in itself), sharing a house known as The Disgrace with retired Commissaire Old Man Vandoosler, a mixture that doesn't sound anywhere near as off the wall that it turns out to be.

There's only one Evangelist story translated into English, so apart from The Three Evangelists, which has definite oddball appeal, if you're looking for a genuinely off the wall read you're probably going to be heading for the Commissaire Adamsberg books.

He's not quite in the same league as the National Coroner of Laos, but Adamsberg, a practitioner of Zen and the art of solving murder mysteries has raised the bar when it comes to inscrutable eccentric investigators, aided in his efforts by the more methodical Danglard, an ideal candidate to carry out the leg work that allows Adamsberg to come to the instinctive solution to a problem anyone else would be inclined to dismiss as insolvable.

Musician and plumber Camille Forestier, an avid reader of The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft drifts in and out of the stories, providing the means to link Adamsberg, busy in Paris avoiding a prostitute intent on murderous revenge after he very accidentally killed her pimp, with a chain of slaughters and savagings that start in the mountainous Mercantour National Park near Nice and may or may not be the work of a werewolf.

Camille, having taken up with a Canadian expert on wolves, is in the mountains with him when debate whether the mutilated sheep being found across the Alpine pastures are victims of a marauding wolf or something more sinister breaks out.

After farmer Suzanne Rosselin is apparently murdered by the rogue wolf or wolf-man Camille is enlisted to drive the sheep truck while Suzanne's adopted African orphan son Soliman, who has, it seems, swallowed a dictionary and elderly shepherd Watchee set out to track down the suspect, an  outcast abattoir worker named Massart whose lack of body hair makes him, in the minds of the locals, a prime candidate for lycanthropy, since werewolves have all their hair on the inside.

Massart may have disappeared, but wolf-watcher Lawrence Johnstone has found a map left in his house tracing a route across France to a supposed destination in an English slaughterhouse, and once the three avengers realise they've failed to track down Massart, Camille turns to her old flame Adamsberg for assistance, learning that he has conveniently wound up in Avignon pursuing another matter and lying low while avoiding the would-be avenger in Paris.

Having run across one of the later Adamsberg stories in the local library and read The Three Evangelists, I had Fred Vargas on my list of authors to watch for, and Seeking Whom He May Devour confirms that Adamsberg's a character of genuine eccentric charm. I've got This Night's Foul Work on the waiting to read pile, so it's a case of chasing down copies of The Chalk Circle Man, Have Mercy On Us All, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand and An Uncertain Place to round out a series that is a definite keeper.