The Chalk Circle Man / Fred Vargas

 

2.5 stars? Maybe?

This is one of the oddest mysteries that I have read in years. The man that the series is named after, Jean-Baptiste Adamsburg, is very unlike your usual detective. He doesn't do much detecting or indeed much analysis. Indeed, he just seems to channel things from the ether. In the meantime, he fantasizes about a previous girlfriend, who just got up one morning, walked out the door, and disappeared from his life. He tries to avoid his current woman, who shows up on his doorstep occasionally. And he sleeps with his downstairs neighbour whenever she signals her willingness. Most fictional detectives can't maintain even one relationship, let alone juggle several.

Who would create such a main character? Well, my first discovery was that Fred is a woman, Frederique, and a historian and archaeologist with an expertise in the Black Death. She writes novels to relax, perhaps why Adamsburg has such a loose style of investigation.

So why did I keep on reading? Because of one older female character, Mathilde. An oceanographer with a penchant for collecting difficult people and being somewhat irritable herself. She divides the week in three parts: Monday to Wednesday, one may be optimistic, kind, sympathetic; Thursday to Saturday, it's a tougher outlook and bring out the booze please; she never does define what Sundays are about. She also has a bad habit of following people. She chooses a person for the day and keeps notes on what they do.

So when someone starts drawing large chalk circles around found items on the Paris streets with a cryptic question written around the edges, she wants to know more. Eventually, she runs across him, realizing that he is a man she has followed before. She brings herself to Adamsburg's attention by engineering a meeting with him after he becomes obviously interested in the Chalk Circle Man.

Mathilde and her two lodgers, Clemance and Charles, are the most interesting aspects of the book. Clemance is an older woman obsessed with answering personal ads in the newspaper (remember those?) in a vain attempt to look for love. Charles is a handsome but very bitter blind man who is often nasty to sighted people simply because he can get away with it. The antics of the three of them are highly entertaining.

The final answer to the mystery is ingenious, but Sherlock Holmes would shudder at the method. Hercule Poirot would be most affronted. I was merely nonplussed.