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. 