Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

Logic, Intuition and a Murderous Octogenarian

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand by Fred Vargas is the 4th Commissaire Adamsberg novel and won the 2007 Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger.

The story is an eclectic mix of a serial killer, a fat detective, an internet-hacking granny and exploding toads. Somehow Vargas manages to pull it all together into a riveting, if somewhat surreal, read.

Synopsis

A discarded newspaper set off a wave of angst in Commissaire Adamsberg. An article detailed a murder in Eastern France where a drunk had murdered a young woman. He had stabbed her three times, each blow forming a perfectly spaced line of wounds. It was almost as if he had impaled her with a three-tined pitchfork or a trident.

The news article dragged Adamsberg back thirty years to his first encounter with the murderous “Trident”. A murderer that Adamsberg had chased across France for fourteen years, following a trail of dead bodies. The trial had only grown cold when Adamsberg’s quarry, a man in his eighties, died of old age.

Could a dead man — who, if still alive, would be approaching one hundred years old — spring from the grave, drag a grown woman off a bicycle and impale her with a trident? Or was Adamsberg, as his colleagues believed, obsessed and deluded?

Review

Fred Vargas’s Wash this Blood Clean From My Hand tells a bizarre tale of an elderly serial killer who rises from the dead with an outlandish grudge. It is set against an unfathomable French – Canadian international exchange and all propped up with — I kid you not — exploding toads. At face value, this is, as the French would say, “une bêtise”… complete nonsense.

But to dismiss Vargas’s tale that rashly would be equally “fou”. Vargas creates an absorbing alternative reality laced with kafkaesque crimes and surreal images. She invents a cast of fascinating characters, from the elderly spinster who hacks the internet whilst wearing a twin set and tennis shoes to a fat female detective who is so plain that men ignore her. Then embroils them in an intricate plot full of guilt, betrayal, revenge and loyalty.

Whilst the storyline could be horrific — an undead man who disembowels his victims with a pitchfork — Vargas’s telling of it is more akin to one of Aesop’s fables than a Stephen King slasher novel.

Commissaire Adamsberg’s world is entertaining, witty, thought-provoking and original. It drew me in, if only to discover if toads do explode when given a cigarette, “puff, puff, puff, bang.”

Excerpt

After supper, once the children were in their rooms, he sat down at his table, in an anxious frame of mind, having lined up three beers and three files. The children had all gone to bed too late. He had had the badly-timed idea of telling them the story of the toad that smoked cigarettes, puff, puff, puff, bang. The questions had come in thick and fast. Why did the toad smoke? Why did it explode? What size melon did it look like? Did its guts fly very high in the air? Would it work for snakes? Danglard had in the end had to forbid them to carry out any experiments along these lines: they were not to put a cigarette in the mouth of any snake, toad or salamander, lizard, pike or in fact any creature whatsoever.

But finally, by eleven o’clock, the schoolbags were all packed, the dishes had been washed and the lights were out.

Danglard attacked the dossiers in chronological order, memorising the names of the victims, the place and time of the crime, and the identity of the perpetrators. Eight murders, all committed, he noted, when the number of the year was uneven. But after all, odd or even years are a fifty-fifty matter, and can hardly be called a coincidence. The only thing that really linked these various murders was the unshakeable conviction of the commissaire that they were connected; nothing immediately suggested that they were the work of the same man. Eight murders, all in different regions of France: Loire-Atlantique, Touraine, Dordogne, Pyrenees. True, one could imagine that the judge had moved about a lot, to avoid being traced. But the victims were also very diverse, in age, sex and appearance: young, middle-aged and old, male and female, fat and thin, blond and dark. That didn’t seem to fit the obsessional pattern of a serial killer. And the weapons were different in each case: kitchen knives, sharpened screwdrivers, carpenters’ awls, hunting knives, flick knives, chisels.

Danglard shook his head, feeling somewhat discouraged. He had been hoping to follow Adamsberg’s lead, but such a variety of circumstances created a serious obstacle.

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand by Fred Vargas