Things get off to an odd start here, with Maigret visiting a guy on death row who puts him on the scent of a murder that had gone unnoticed some six years earlier. A trip to a hatshop to buy a new bowler gives him a clue to follow up and before long he’s getting miserably reacquainted with what the back cover describes as “the sleazy underside of respectable Parisian life.”

Familiar ground then for the detective chief inspector, but what struck me as strange is how the plot seemed to move ahead by a series of random coincidences. Though I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised at how a case comes together, as this one does, by “a combination of scientific deduction and sheer luck.” That’s the way a lot of life works.

The respectable Parisians also seemed odd to me. Doctors, business owners, tradespeople, engineers: they work hard all week and then hang out together every Sunday at a bar in the suburbs where they play dress-up and drink a lot. Is this something people did back in the 1930s?

Party time also involves a lot of adultery, which blows up in the usual way. Though Maigret is less interested in who plugged the poor cuckold than he is in who killed the mystery man six years ago. But the list of suspects isn’t long, and when you spot the biggest red flag in any Maigret case – a husband and wife living apart together, with “No hint of intimacy whatsoever” – then you’ll probably figure things out as quickly as he does. Such couples are the opposite of the happily married Maigrets who are always in touch and feel like they’re together even when they’re apart (as they are for all of this novel). So the real challenge here is for Maigret to prove what happened, which becomes a series of duels because nearly everyone he meets plays coy with him, starting with the condemned man at the beginning. They all let on that they know something he doesn’t, and then challenge him to find out what it is.

This wasn’t one of the better Maigret stories, and really the only thing that makes it stand out is the treatment of the scummy blackmailer at the end. This guy is such a piece of shit he even uses his terminal illness as leverage. That was an appropriate touch to further blacken his miserable character. It just seemed perfectly right. Meanwhile, the killer has no trouble deciding he’d rather go to jail than pay him off. Everybody has their principles, and blackmail is a dirty game that even cold-blooded killers can rise above.

Maigret index