Fred Vargas's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Fred Vargas is the pen name of Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau. Born in Paris in 1957, she is one of three children, with a twin sister and a brother. Her father was the prominent surrealist Philippe Audoin-Rouzeau, and her mother was a scientist.

A Surrealist Upbringing

Vargas’s father had a significant impact on her literary career. Whilst he wrote many books, he earned a living working for an insurance company.

“He never talked about his job, apart from saying ‘I am going to the box.'” (The Guardian)

He banned television in the house, only allowing his children to read. Even then, of the thousands of books he owned, he only permitted them to look at a few, predominately myths, folk tales and poetry.

“Can you imagine it? Having books that were ‘authorised’! And many of them were too old for children, although I did love the myths. And our house was also full of primitive arts and masks and this surrealist fascination with death and decay. Thank God my mother was a chemist who helped us keep our heads on our shoulders because a surrealist atmosphere is really not so good for children.” (The Guardian)

Life as a Historian

Vargas went on to get a doctorate in history from the University of Paris, where she specialised in archaeozoology. She was particularly interested in the plague and has published several academic texts. Perhaps most notable was Les chemins de la peste: le rat, la puce et l’homme (The paths of the plague: the rat, the flea and the man).

As well as having an interest in history, Vargas is a political activist with forthright environmental and left-wing views. Like Peter May, she foresaw a pandemic. In 2006 in a TV interview, she predicted an avian flu epidemic and had a public spat with the French Health Ministry on how best to deal with it.

She took part in the defence of Cesare Battisti, writing La vérité sur Cesare Battisti. He was an Italian terrorist found guilty of four assassinations in 1970s Italy during the “Years of Lead“. In 2018 she voiced her support for the Climate Finance Pact and published another book. L’humanité en péril details the impact of changes to the world’s climate and biodiversity.

Crime Writing for Fun

Despite her academic and political views, Fred Vargas is best known as a crime writer. She wrote her first fiction novel, Les jeux de l’amour et de la mort (Games of Love and Death), in the mid-1980s whilst working at an archaeological site. Although she only wrote it for fun, as a counterpoint to an archaeologist’s dry and fact-filled life, it won a competition for unpublished manuscripts and began her writing career.

Unfortunately, her father was ill and died before her first novel was published.

“But of course, I would have shown it to him, and I know what he would have said: ‘Fred, this is shit from A to Z’. And he would have been right, and I would have stopped writing, so it is strange how it worked out.” (The Guardian)

Since then, she has written more than a dozen novels under the pseudonym Vargas. She and her twin sister — the artist Jo Vargas — use the same pseudonym. The name is a tribute to María Vargas, Ava Gardner’s character in The Barefoot Contessa.

Surreal Crime Fiction

Fred Vargas’s books have a dreamlike quality to them. They take their cues from her work as a medieval historian and her early life reading the myths and legends prescribed by her father. Though her stories have a fairy tale quality, you should expect the Brothers Grimm, not Walt Disney.

The Three Evangelists are historians who — urged on by the miraculous overnight appearance of a beech tree — investigate the disappearance of an opera singer. In Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, a judge rises from the grave to kill a woman using Neptune’s trident. Whilst in An Uncertain Place, Vargas’s hero discovers 17 shoes lined up with the remains of human feet inside them. Chopping the feet off a vampire is a tried and tested way of slowing it down.

Vargas has also supplied arctic demons, werewolves and a troop of ghosts on horseback.

Whilst the plots appear supernatural, her perpetrators are most certainly not. Vargas serves up unique, inventive and — taking after her father — surreal stories.

“I am not a realist. I deal with reality. We create from reality, but we disfigure it.” (WMagazin)

Praise From the Critics

Vargas embroiders her inventive plots with subplots and then fortifies them with poetic dialogue and a sly, underhand sense of humour. It is easy to see why her romans policiers are widely acclaimed. Fred Vargas’s books have won four International Dagger Awards in the UK, three for successive novels. She is also a regular member of Le Figaro’s annual list of the top ten best-selling French novelists.

Politics Versus Fiction

Like another French International Dagger Winner, Dominique Manotti, Vargas is publicly forthright in her political views. However, unlike Manotti, she keeps these separate from her stories.

“I watch a lot of the news, I take part in all the petitions on the Internet, especially on the environment, with the WWF, the Hulot Foundation: endocrine disruptors, the oceans, I’m concerned… But I’ve never put a political message in a detective story.” (Liberation)

In interviews, she often quotes a character in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, set in the run-up to the French Revolution. “Politics…is a stone tied around the neck of literature”.

Vargas’s stated ambition is much more straightforward:

“I have only one goal, to tell a good story.” (Aufbau Verlage)