I read The Grand Banks Café out of order, coming to it after I’d nearly finished the Maigret series. It’s an early novel, one of nine (!) in the series that were published in 1931. Simenon was just getting started, and still writing in a white heat. Apparently he only took eleven days to write a Maigret roman, because if they took any longer he felt like he’d burn out.

I should have liked this more, as I was coming off reading the later, less distinguished entries and part of the action here is about as close as the series came to Canada. A trawler returns from fishing cod off Newfoundland, but the captain is murdered as soon as he leaves the ship. A wimpy young man who was radio operator on the trawler is arrested and Maigret, who is technically on holiday and only “working in a private capacity” is asked by a friend to look into the matter. Madame Maigret raises some objections because they’d planned to stay for a week with her family in Alsace, while “the thought of staying in a hotel by the seaside with a lot of other people from Paris filled her with dread.” But that’s all we hear in the way of complaining, and immediately she’s packing her sewing and crocheting. How obliging she is!

The idea here is pretty good, with Maigret trying to piece together, largely through intuition, what happened on this “voyage of the damned.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand the motivation of any of the principals, and by the time the wireless operator (literally) spills his guts I thought it had all become implausibly melodramatic in a way Simenon usually avoided. Even the femme fatale, if you can call her that, is a blowsy caricature, her seductiveness limited to offering up “fragrant flesh in a trawler that stank of fish.” Madame Maigret had a point about holidaying in such a place, especially given that this is another story where her husband lets the perp walk. They should have gone to Alsace.

Maigret index