Debout les morts - Fred Vargas
Debout les morts is a fine introduction into the strange ways that Fred Vargas's crime books operate, with unconventional characters who have quirky mannerisms, but with something a little more traditional (although still far from conventional) in how the crime plot is laid out and resolved. Marc, Mathias and Luc are three impoverished academics down on their luck (dans la merde), who don't know each other that well, but come to share the expenses of renting a rundown dump in a nonetheless relatively well-to-do area of Paris.
The 'three evangelists' are so-named by Vandoosler, a disgraced former police commissioner, who notices that their names correspond with three of the New Testament saints, Matthew, Mark and Luke. The three men, all in their mid-thirties, have very little in common with each other in their temperament and in their fields of study, Marc being an expert on the Middle-Ages, Mathias in the pre-history period and Lucien a historian of the Great War (un contemporaniste!). What they do have in common, as they frequently observe, is being "dans la merde".
Each have a separate floor in the 'baraque', with Marc's uncle/father Armand Vandoosler also moving in and taking the upper floor. They live next door to Pierre Reliveaux and wife Sophia, who wakes up one morning to find a beech tree planted in their garden. Mathias recognises his neighbour as Sophia Siméonidis, an ex-opera singer from Greece of no little renown, when she comes to seek assistance from her new neighbours to find out what, if anything, lies beneath the young freshly planted beech tree.
There is nothing under the tree, but even though this image resonates throughout the book, it is more than just a maguffin. Mathias starts to work at brasserie of neighbour on the other side of the baraque, Juliette, and the three evangelists and Vandoosler become friends with their neighbours. When Sophia suddenly disappears, her husband doesn't appear to be all that concerned, and there is a suggestion that Stelyos, a former partner of Sophia from Greece, has reappeared after 20 years and has contacted her mysteriously from Lyon. Following on from the mysterious appearance of the beech tree, the evangelists are more concerned for her well-being.
Their concern grows when Sophia's niece Alexandra or Lex arrives with her young child. They have come from Lyon. She is temporarily taken in by the evangelists and then by Juliette while Vandoosler contacts a friend in the police force to help in the search for Sophia. Soon after however, a burnt body is found in a destroyed building. The body is unidentifiable but they find a lucky stone that belonged to Sophia that she never parted with. As her activities and movements cannot be verified, suspicion falls on Lex when it is revealed that she stands to inherit some of Sophia's fortune.
If it were just down to the plotting, the revelations, the twists and the resolution, Debout les morts would still be a fine crime murder-mystery thriller, but as we have come to see with Vargas, there is a whole lot else going on that sets this apart from most regular crime fiction, and it is certainly unlike anything else in French crime fiction. Principally there are the unconventional investigators, historians, evangelists, "investigators of time", and Vargas finds a lot of wry humour in how these academically minded young men interact, each with different uncommon interests, all of them not entirely capable of dealing with everyday realities. Marc being protective of Lex and Mathias having a mutual attraction to Juliette also creates complications and affects their judgement.
What is rather less easy to define is the way Vargas introduces what she calls "bass notes" into the orchestra of the plot and characterisation - little elements that are not quite symbolic, but which harmonise with the mood and sometimes strike discordant notes or simply enigmatic reference points. 'Merde' and 'dans la merde' being one of those motifs here, along with the shifting of metaphorical tectonic plates. "Nuance. Du pain et des symboles. C'est fondamental." comments Vandoosler at one point, and in a way that attention to nuance, symbols and - in its own indefinable way, the staple of bread - also serves to describe what is fundamental and exceptional in the works of Fred Vargas.
Reading notes: Currently re-reading all Fred Vargas in French. I previously read this in a collected slipcased paperback French edition of the Three Evangelists books, but I no longer have that edition. This re-reading was from an eBook collected edition 'Pack collector Fred Vargas - Les Enquêtes des Evangélistes', which collects Debout les morts, Un peu plus loin sur la droite and Sans feu ni lieu.
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