Product Description

Joss le Guern is a town crier in Paris's 14th arrondissement. He calls out the local news three times a day to all who will listen. Over the course of a few days, however, a number of enigmatic and disturbing messages are slipped in to the daily news, and he becomes increasingly alarmed. Superintendent Adamsberg is visited by an extremely troubled woman who has found strange marks on the door of her building: upside down 4s marked out in black paint. This, and the appearance of the frightening messages, are exactly the kind of mysteries Adamsberg loves. In the course of his inquiries he begins to sense a sinister and often grotesque menace. And when a charred corpse is found, Adamsberg knows he's dealing with a particularly serious and chilling case. "Have Mercy on us All" is Fred Vargas's masterpiece so far. She is exceptional at building mood and tension, and, as Henning Mankell portrays the social realities of contemporary Sweden in his Inspector Wallander mysteries, so Vargas does the same for Paris and France.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25022 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'A delicious Parisian chiller'

Guardian
'Moody, tense and grotesque, Vargas's prize-winning novel is a fascinating exploration of Paris's dark side'

From the Publisher
Translated from the French by David Bellos.
Winner of the Grand Prix Litt-raire des Lectrices, 2002.
Winner of the Prix des Libraires, 2002

Customer Reviews

Fred Vargas - Have Mercy on Us All
Three times daily in a small Paris square, eccentric Joss Le Guern cries out the news items people have dropped into his box. Over a few days, a series of increasingly disturbing and eerie messages are left, the Plague their theme. Nervous tongues begin to wag. Strange markings are also starting to appear on doorways in various sections of the city; symbols once used to ward off the Black Death. Commissioner Adamsberg gets to hear of the bizarre events and senses something sinister. It’s a sense that’s borne out when a charred and flea-bitten corpse turns up, and panic starts to set in across the city…

Have Mercy on Us All is a strange, twisted, gothic thriller. Impossible to categorise, it is, like the very best of crime fiction, completely original. Originality is harder and harder to come across, given that so much has been written, but this prize-winning book has it in spades. The plot is like nothing I’ve really read before, an eccentric, esoteric examination of hysteria and plague, while still managing to be a detective story too. Vargas seems to have a fascination with fear and hysteria; old mythologies, old atavistic phobias that worm their way into an old, vulnerable part of the human brain and fascinate at the same time as terrifying, are placed in modern society, and she observes what happens. (The second novel, Seeking Whom He May Devour – which has just been shortlisted for the Gold Dagger, (and I hope it takes at least Silver) – is about werewolves.) Her subject matter is interesting; archaic and fatally fascinating. And her interest in the human response to hysteria and fear is nicely relevant in today’s world.

The characters, too, are unlike any I’ve come across before. They too are touched with the magical originality that lifts the rest of the book above almost everything I’ve read this year. An old ex seaman who now spends his days in a small Parisian square crying out news-items people drop into his box along with a coin? Genius! Elderly ex-teacher Decambrais, the an who realises the messages are warning of plague, is great fun also, and the old antagonism between he and Le Guern is oddly charming. These elderly gents behave in exactly the same way as younger people, which is nice to see. They’re all an odd, eclectic, eccentric bunch. Oddly sympathetic, despite often being a rather stubborn lot. The protagonist, Adamsberg, is like the rest of them quirky and interesting; he’s enigmatic, intuitive, and he carries what you sense is quite a lot of pain very close to his heart and protects it quietly and determinedly.

The translation by award-winning David Bellos is what gives the icing to the cake. It’s archaic, olde-worlde, brilliantly atmospheric and just as eccentric as the plot and the characters. It’s also a lot of fun. It helps bring across a sense of old history that’s crucial to the sense of the book; a kind of melding of mediaeval gothic with universal human nature.

Have Mercy On Us All is a fun, disturbing, quirky, engrossing, charming, fascinating read. It’s a superb crime novel, and it’s no surprise to know it won a clutch of awards on the continent. I can’t wait for more to be translated (and apparently there are quite a few). I can guarantee it’s like nothing you’ve read before; to sum it up best is to say that it is very, very French. Get it now.

Interesting story, bad translation
Most of the rating is for the story, a clever mystery about a search for a nearly invisible weapon. The title and the very terrific cover indicate that the return of the bubonic plague to Paris comprises the nature of the threat. That gives the story an interesting timeliness -- what with 21st Century paranoia about bio weapons -- and a very nice patina of creepiness.

The translation was very distracting. The translator used a lot of dated British slang for a book that should have struck notes of Paris. This mistake had an impact on the sense of the main character and on the presentation of the local color, something I always seek when I read books set in the City of Light. Fred Vargas deserved better.

A Fred Vargus fan
I have read all the Fred Vargus books in French and one translated into English. L'homme a l'invers. I believe that they are better in French than in English. The story in translation was inferior in comparison to the story in the natural language. You don't need to be brilliant at French but you do need a good dictionary. I fininshed " Pars vite et reviens tard "( Have mercy on us all) late last night, Wednesday and could not put it down since I began it on Sunday last. Some of her books' characters link up in her other novels. I liked the historical content and learned a lot about the plague. I write notes as I go along to keep track of characters and events and try to solve the mystery. Can't wait for the next one. I will think about the book and characters for days now.