He is an absent-minded and visionary commissioner, who allows “extravagant ideas to sway, intertwine, collide, thicken, disperse and find each other”, the one conceived by the French archaeologist, medievalist and essayist Fred Vargas (pseudonym of Frédérique Audouin-Rouzeau) for her detective stories singular, given that Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, “his” commissioner, immediately appeared as a successful character since “The Man with the Blue Circles” (first of the series, 1991).
Middle-aged, unconventional in dressing, unlike his deputy, the elegant and cultured Adrien Danglard, on whose knowledge Adamsberg draws without envy or sense of inferiority, he arrived at the police station in the 5th Arrondissement of Paris after having solved numerous difficult cases. Not inclined to conflicts, he doesn’t get angry if someone thinks that his investigations are bizarre and complicated. But his collaborators, including Veyrenc, Mercadet, Noël and the strong agent Violette Retancourt, blindly believe in his choices and in his ability to observe everything in the cauldron of the most heinous or grotesque crimes, as in the last of the series, «On stone” (Einaudi, translated by Margherita Botto and Simona Mambrini), in which Adamsberg, fighting gracefully against the shackles of bureaucracy, finds the solution through a series of grotesque details, such as the fact that the killer leaves in the hands of the victim a fertilized and crushed egg.
But the other characters in the novel, set in Louviec, in a fascinating landscape like Breton Normandy, rich in legends, are also “strange” and eccentric: Josselin de Chateaubriand, who as «Viscount of Chateaubriand» (homonymous and perhaps descendant of famous poet) is taken into account in the village because it adds local color together with the Château de Combourg with its very old ghost of the Lame Count who makes his wooden leg feel sinisterly before a mournful event occurs.
And then there is the innkeeper Johan of the Auberge des Deux Ècus, with his succulent dishes that provide refreshment to the local commissioner Matthieu and the Adamsberg team, and the local wives, and a strange “sect” of Ombristi who they fight against the Shadowy, those who purposely with their shadow maliciously cover that of others on the street. All in a both rural and tourist dimension in which there is no lack of a gallery of animals, from the hedgehog rescued by Adamsberg (his sympathy for animals is given to him by Vargas, who is also an archaeozoologist) to the fleas (a possible lead to identifying the killer, given that the victims all have signs of flea bites) to the placid donkey who rubs her head against that of the inspector. Which among disconcerting leads, ramifications of parallel crimes, reflections aloud seasoned with her “I don’t know” (“Je ne sais pas” is the mantra often used by Vargas herself), drinking chouchen (mead) offered by Johan, also solves this case perhaps also thanks to the ancestral energy of the menhir, on which he loves to lie down to “shovel the clouds”.