How did it get so late so soon?

My apologies for plagiarizing Dr. Seuss.

But he is always so right.

WHAT I’VE READ:

“A Climate of Fear” by Fred Vargas, translated from the French by Sian Reynolds, Harville Secker, 2016

Fred Vargas is one of my favourite crime writers. A historian and archeologist by profession, she has four times won the CWA International Dagger Award for her fiction.

“A Climate of Fear” is her most recent, published en francais in 2015 and translated a year later into English.

Commissaire Adamsberg is no Harry Hole, Adam Dalgleish or Kurt Wallander. And his associates are an eclectic bunch – a second-in-command with an encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything, a narcoleptic officer who disappears for naps at unexpected and sometimes inconvenient times, a female lieutenant whose bulk once saved Adamsberg from almost certain death, a cat which sleeps on the office photocopier and needs to be carried downstairs to its food bowl.

Adamsberg is as likely to be found wandering in a forest as he is in the office or at the crime scene. He needs his thinking time.

Every evening when he returns home, his next-door neighbour, a Spaniard who lost an arm and still occasionally feels an itch from the spider that was stinging him just prior to the loss, arrives with two bottles of beer. They sit down under a tree and talk. When the beer is finished, the neighbour urinates against the tree; Adamsberg remonstrates with him; the neighbour says it is good for the tree and goes home.

Living with Adamsberg is Zirk, who appeared several novels ago as an unexpected guest and possible son. Twenty-something and unemployed, Zirk is enough like the commissaire to be make the paternity possible. There is another, much younger and uncontested child as well. Adamsberg’s relationships with women are numerous but short-lived, although their consequences are often long-lasting.

I love these characters – eccentric and idiosyncratic as they are. And I enjoy the convolutions of the plot twists that may seem outwardly unbelievable.

“A Climate of Fear”, for examples, introduces us to an elderly housecleaner who lives alone in the forest with a wild boar as body guard, a secret Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre (which specializes in mandatory period costume and plenty of “Off with their heads!”) and a tourist trip to Iceland where rumors of an Icelandic demon are cover-up for less spiritual evil doings.

Vargas always manages to pull it all together with intelligence and elan. Her books are a cross between crime noir and Monsieur Poirot.

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I have read five books since I finished “A Climate of Fear”, and started a sixth. My goal was to write something – no matter how brief – about each book I read.