As the annoying sticker on the cover of this one says, Maigret and Monsieur Charles is “the last Maigret novel.” Which made for a tidy 75. A good number to go out on, but I don’t know if Simenon knew it was going to be the last. He’d only announce his retirement from writing (fiction) a year later and at this point he might have just been feeling burnt out.

It doesn’t read like any kind of farewell. Sure, Maigret is closing in on retirement, but he’d been thinking about that forty years earlier. He’s basically one of those iconic fictional characters who exist in a time warp where they’re always the same age while the world around them changes, like Archie’s gang or the family on The Simpsons.

Things get started with a discussion about kicking the detective chief inspector upstairs so that he can become head of the Police Judiciaire, but our hero doesn’t want to go that route and nothing more is said of it after the opening chapter. So instead of feeling like the final novel in the series it just seems like another day at the office, and not a particularly interesting one either.

Madam Sabin-Levesque shows up at Maigret’s office to report that her husband has been missing for over a month. As Maigret soon learns, it was an unhappy marriage, with Madam being an alcoholic and Monsieur, a successful lawyer gadding about Paris with a series of “hostesses” under the assumed name of Monsieur Charles. The usual tell-tale sign of a married couple sleeping in separate bedrooms is here taken to an extreme. “On this side of the main drawing room, you are in my half of the apartment,” Madam Sabin-Levesque explains as she gives Maigret a tour. “The other side is my husband’s territory.” That’s bad.

It’s also a dead giveaway, and the fact that there’s really only one suspect in play, and that the explanation for how everything went down is just thrown at us in the final few pages, makes this a pretty limp effort. It’s the usual peek behind closed doors at family dysfunction in the “outmoded, inward-looking world” of Parisian affluence, with a perp who is more pathetic than villainous. And once again Maigret is left wondering what the point is. I suppose Simenon was wondering too.

Maigret index