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Fred Vargas works as an archaeologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, where she specialises in animal bones. She has written 12 novels about her detective hero, the slow-thinking, intuitive Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. She is also the moving force behind a group of French artists, philosophers and writers who believe that the French government has shamefully reneged on its promise to give Cesare Battisti and his fellow political refugees immunity from extradition in return for them giving up political activism.

Can you approach a detective story in the same way as archaeology?

For years I was asked if the two were linked. I said no, because I was writing novels for fun. Archaeology is hard work and my colleagues are nice people, but they are serious. I am serious too, when I鈥檓 working. We don鈥檛 dance at the end of conferences. I needed an escape. When I was younger I found it playing my accordion; now I write. I do see a link now in the desire to find a way through a problem. The difference is that the truth is rarely certain in history, but when you are inventing a detective story, you are the master 鈥� you know the truth. The most pleasant part, though, is playing with the words. Playing with the music of the words.

The plague theme emerges in your first novel to be translated into English, Have Mercy On Us All. Why?

I have spent three years sitting on a stool in the grey, dusty attics of the Pasteur Institute, reading all those mediaeval and modern texts 鈥� by 鈥渕odern鈥� I mean from the 16th to the 18th centuries. It is terrible and beautiful to witness the struggle for life, the despair that the observers describe. Plague is a heavy subject, because it still exists, killing people every year. So I took notes for a novel as I was going along. I wrote Have Mercy On Us All^* to share the burden with my readers.

Why were you reading about plague?

I specialise in animal bones. That leads me into many areas. Animals are everywhere in human life: in religion, food, clothes and commerce. Many of our diseases come from animals 鈥� malaria, for instance, or variant CJD. And because bones are often preserved, you can write about the poor in Hungary in the 7th century, for example, about whom there are no texts, because you have found contemporary animal bones.

Can you infer people鈥檚 attitudes to animals from the bones?

Yes, in excavations. When digging up a medieval kitchen floor, for instance, you can pick out the bones of the same rat mixed up with other bones from animals eaten for food. All the rat鈥檚 bones are there, though the left and right femurs are 3 metres apart. That means that when the rat died, its corpse was left there, entire on the kitchen floor. Nobody made the effort to throw it out of the window. Its bones were then dispersed by people walking through them. It shows that people didn鈥檛 fear rats, they were used to them.

What鈥檚 so interesting about rats?

It was not certain what date the black rat, Rattus rattus, arrived in Europe. Originally it came from central Asia. There was a belief that it had entered Europe with the returning crusaders at the beginning of the 12th century, but no one had proved that for certain. I found it very puzzling. The commercial links between Europe and the Roman empire鈥檚 oriental ports were so dense and important that I found it impossible to believe that the rat had not come over earlier. So we went digging for it 鈥� the rat, that is 鈥� in older layers.

Why does it matter when the black rat got to Europe?

There had been a huge plague lasting from the 6th to the 8th centuries, known as the Justinian plague, which affected countries around the Mediterranean. In France it did not spread beyond the south. Now because this pandemic exploded before archaeologists said the black rat had arrived from the orient, in the 1940s people began to argue that the vector could not be the rat flea after all. They suggested that the human flea was responsible for transmitting this plague in Europe. It seemed to me that the archaeological foundations for that theory were flimsy.

So what did you do?

Starting in 1983, I created a map. A synthesis of all the digs where the black rat had been found. That way I could study its arrival and spread in Europe. I proved that it came in with the Romans. It arrived first on islands in the Mediterranean in the 1st century, then spread to the continent. In the temperate climate of Europe the black rat cannot live freely as it does in India. It is obliged to stay with man: that鈥檚 its fate. So it emerged from my own and other people鈥檚 work that the black rat had followed the Roman trade routes. By the time the Justinian plague broke out, the black rat鈥檚 habitat covered the exact area of France that was affected by the disease. The black rat鈥檚 invasion of Europe was complete by the 12th or 13th century.

Have you changed the minds of the proponents of the human flea theory?

Not yet. My friend, the entomologist Jean-Claude Beaucournu, and I still argue back and forth about it. I realised that the archaeological evidence was not enough on its own. I鈥檓 a bit obsessional about synthesis. My aim is always to sum up the discoveries of others. Here I saw that the only way to prove anything was to combine insights and evidence from six areas: archaeology, history, medicine, entomology, epidemiology and microbiology. For instance, I re-read the protocols of the researchers who had 鈥減roved鈥� with test-tube experiments that the human flea could transmit the disease. I worked out how their results could have been contaminated.

What about those texts in the dusty attic?

A plague epidemic begins with a few cases, then you hear nothing for several weeks before 鈥� whoomph! 鈥� it comes back with a vengeance. That silence, that latent period, proves that the rat flea is the vector. A man arrives in a place bringing infected rat fleas. He may infect the few people he comes into contact with, but the fleas quickly move off to their preferred hosts, the local rats. Suddenly all the rats die. The fleas are forced to accept the next best thing, a human. If the human flea were the culprit, the disease would spread immediately and exponentially. Instead, there is this silence. I went looking for these latent periods. I found at least a hundred examples. It was a striking phenomenon in the chronicles from medieval to modern times.

How did people react to the plague ?

After the first minor outbreak they would think, phew, it鈥檚 not plague. On its return they would often accuse the government of a cover-up, of lying about the true death toll to prevent mass panic. There were many scandals of this kind. Scapegoats would be found, people would be burnt. As has happened, in my view, with Battisti.

Your work revolves around disease and death. Are you a morbid person?

No, I hate morbidity, but I like to play with the old fears, the fears we learned as children. So I play with the wolf 鈥� the plague 鈥� and perhaps even the vampire one day. Why not? Detective stories have a vocation to help people live with their fears. I think they succeed.

Are you as intuitive as your detective hero police chief Adamsberg?

No, I鈥檓 just the contrary so I think that鈥檚 why I created him that way. I鈥檓 obsessive, anguished, always searching for the logical sequence. I hate the way I work. I would like to have a rest and be like him. He is calm, he can contemplate a landscape and stop. He can dream 鈥� I don鈥檛 allow irrational dreams to enter my thought processes.

Is your twin involved in your writing?

Jo is involved in everything. She is a brilliant artist. When I have written the first draft of a book, I show it to her. She says, this is great, but I don鈥檛 understand this bit, or that bit leaves me cold. And I know that I haven鈥檛 captured the music there. So I say to her, what鈥檚 missing? And she replies, sorry, Fred, that鈥檚 your problem. It鈥檚 the same with her paintings. I can point to a dead area, or say something doesn鈥檛 work for me. She鈥檒l ask me why. I reply, that鈥檚 your problem, Jo. We try to help each other, but in the end, perhaps we just transmit our doubts.

Vargas is a pen name. Why did you choose it?

To begin with it was a game, two sisters having a laugh at the end of a dinner. Jo was looking for a name to paint under. She chose Vargas because she loved the film The Barefoot Contessa in which Ava Gardner plays Maria Vargas. Years later, when I was about to publish my first novel, I happened to be seeking my first post at the French national scientific research agency CNRS. Detective stories are a despised genre in France, so I felt obliged to keep my 鈥渧ice鈥� hidden. I took the same pseudonym as Jo. It has caused a few problems. When I was invited onto the radio, I would sit waiting in the corridor for hours because everyone was expecting a large South American man wearing a sombrero and smoking a cigar.

You wrote a third book this year to support Cesare Battisti. Why?

I am an archaeologist. There is nothing worse for an archaeologist than to see the truth distorted. When bulldozers threaten to destroy a site, we even go along at night with lights to do what we can to save it. Moreover, I鈥檓 a medievalist so I know how often in our long history we have burnt men and women as sorcerers and witches. We haven鈥檛 seen this kind of demonisation of a person in France since the Dreyfus affair of 1894. This piece of history has not been told fully yet, neither that of the man nor that of Italy during the 1970s.

What is indisputable is that in 1985, President Fran莽ois Mitterand promised Battisti permanent asylum in France in return for giving up political activism. The present government is brushing that aside. Battisti came to France because he trusted those words. Behind him are 100 others, awaiting a similar fate. As a republican and a French citizen, my political rights and security are also threatened.

Did you know Battisti when you decided to write about him?

Not at all. It was essential to be neutral, so I told him not to approach me and I refused to read his books. You know, it sometimes happens on a dig that it rains, and the whole stratigraphical wall comes crashing down. Then you鈥檙e obliged to sort the 18th-century material from your 12th-century soil, so that you can present the 12th century purely and correctly. And it was exactly with that mindset that I approached the Battisti case. I wrote the book in 12 days. It was published on 6 May.

Have you received threats?

Insults would be more exact but, as Oscar Wilde said, an idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Are you working as an archaeologist at the moment?

I took a year鈥檚 sabbatical last June, because I was exhausted by my research into plague. I said to myself, well, this is nice, now I can take three or four months to write a novel, but I finished it in 21 days as usual. Normally, I would have gone back to my archaeology with the biggest part of the work still to come.

The biggest part?

That is correcting what I call the music of the book. It sometimes takes a year, a year and a half. I correct some passages up to 70 times, just to get the music right. But it took only four months. I handed the manuscripts over to my publisher, Viviane Hamy, on 2 March. The next day I was at the Palais de Justice in Paris, to see if Battisti would get his provisional release, pending the judges鈥� decision. He was released, but I said to myself, he is not yet free. What if I did something to help? And that鈥檚 how it all started.