Although, at the start, she was taken for a man because of her pen name, Fred Vargas has invented a literary genre belonging only to her: “Rompol” (we might say “Noviller” in English). “An essentially poetic genre, it is not black but dark, which is to say it plunges the reader into the oneiric world of those childhood nights when you play at scaring yourself, but in an oh-so-serious way, because the power given to the freed imagination is total. It is this freedom of tone, this capacity to once again find the fragile grace of our primordial emotions, this verbal alchemy that breaks apart the heaviness of the real that are the trademarks of a writer with a unique voice in crime fiction today. The characters that populate her books are as anarchist and outlandish as wise. Be they passionate about Antiquity or oceanographers, the way they look at the world combats conformism and the established order, using fantasy and humour as their weapons". (Jeanne Guyon, Le Magazine littéraire)

There’s no more to say.

A true literary success both in France and abroad, Fred Vargas has a solid and loyal readership throughout the world that awaits each new novel with eagerness and excitement. Her novels have been translated in 35 countries.

The crime fiction category of Elle’s Grand Prix des Lectrices was invented with Have Mercy on Us All in 2002, which had already been awarded the Prix des Libraries that same year.

Since showered with various awards, in 2018, Fred Vargas received the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for literature for the entirety of her works. For the first time, a French woman writer was honoured and, what’s more, a writer of crime fiction.