There are two big Sherlock Holmes movies in production right now. One is a humorous take starring Sacha Baron Cohen; another is a more serious reinvention starring Robert Downey Jr. It's astounding that this crime fighter, whose adventures have long since lapsed into the public domain, retains the kind of shorthand recognition that can inspire studios to bankroll two big-budget productions simultaneously.

Holmes is special in part because he's become so much bigger than his own author's talent. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's other works, including the justly forgotten stories of Professor Challenger, are thin and heavy-handed. Whereas Doyle's style was perfect for the dark sensibilities of his mysteries, the dialogue and characterization don't really elevate the supporting characters to anything more than plot devices with flesh draped on them. With the Holmes stories, Doyle stumbled onto a very successful device: Readers love to follow quirky detectives from book to book.

Among the most popular series detectives in the world right now is Chief Inspector Adamsberg, the star of Parisian mysteries written by Fred Vargas, a masculine pseudonym for French historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau. The frumpy Adamsberg is not the brightest detective in the world, and he often ignores basic interpersonal cues from his right-hand man, Danglard, or his girlfriend, who works as a plumber and a singer. His genius is highly sporadic. In Have Mercy on Us All, a witness notices that Adamsberg's eyes are "the same color and consistency as sea wrack," that they "had no sparkle and no clear object." But when Adamsberg hears something interesting, the witness is shocked to see that "a hard sharp light had switched on inside the seaweed like a tiny fire bursting forth from the gelatinous pod. So he went on and off like a beacon."

The French commissaire solves crimes, to be sure—in HMoUA, a serial killer colors his victims' skin black with charcoal to mimic the bubonic plague, and in Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand, Adamsberg becomes implicated in a series of crimes separated by decades and the Atlantic Ocean. But the real brilliance on Adamsberg's side is his writer: Vargas writes the opposite of the taut faux-Hemingway prose found in your standard American thriller. Adamsberg's wandering intellect is perfectly mirrored by the pleasure that Vargas seems to take in intricately describing the feel of morning air, say, or the petty feud between two eccentric neighbors. The first hundred pages of HMoUA are a luxurious setting of character and scene that any American editor would clip with glee; barely anything happens. Instead, there's gorgeous writing and the laziness of pace to make Adamsberg breathe and bumble his way to a life that Holmes and many of his detective kin never reach. They are books with real, literary value. recommended

constant@thestranger.com