A game of connect-the-dots so playfully rendered I have to wonder if Simenon was just having a bit of fun with these stories now. How far was his tongue in his cheek when he served up this description of the chief inspector: “In the course of his thirty years in the job, Maigret has seen all kinds of everything. He has sniffed the air and smelled the odour of human passions, vices, crimes and manias, the entire ferment of massed humanity.”

All the fun and games come to a dark end indeed though, as this is the most bitterly ironic of all these novels thus far. Madame Le Cloagulen is a figure so vicious the other characters, including Maigret himself, are shocked that she can even exist. She is unnatural, a harpy, someone who leaves Maigret at a loss for words. He can only expostulate “What a bitch . . .” And yet even though he “has it in for her” his plans to nail her for something other than walling her dead husband up fail in the face (and laughter) of an insouciant heiress. Maigret’s “amazing intuition, his frightening ability to put himself in the shoes of other people” isn’t up to the task of dealing with either woman. Perhaps because they are women? I don’t think that’s quite right. But they are modern women, and that’s something he doesn’t seem capable or willing to understand.

Maigret index

Are these Maigret novels really that well written? They’re prefaced in this series by testimonials from authors ranging from William Faulkner to John Banville, so Simenon clearly had, and has, a lot of prominent fans.

I have to say I’ve been less impressed by the literary quality of the series thus far, but in chapter 6 of The Judge’s House the abbreviated style achieves a remarkable effect as Maigret follows up the leads given to him by Judge Forlacroix the night before. Maigret himself recognizes that “it was a little like the reality of a film. A documentary film, for example. Images unreel on the screen. At the same time, the voice of an off-screen narrator comments on them . . .” That’s a passing of the narrative guard that was still pretty new, I think, in 1942.

Unfortunately, the plot here is nonsense from start to finish. I wasn’t even sure what Lise’s problem was. Nymphomania? Whatever. The old busybody Didine was a bit of fun, but in the end she’s tangential to the melodramatic goings-on in the judge’s house.

Maigret index

Upstairs-downstairs at the swank Hotel Majestic, and you know what side Maigret – “plebeian to the bone, to the marrow” – is on. Meanwhile, the rich guy (American, so you know he’s really rich) is an asshole even if he is innocent.

The class divide played a bigger role in some of the earlier books, like The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, but you definitely feel its presence resurfacing here. Still, the social order is never fixed: a dancer can marry a millionaire. This upward mobility is seen in several stories, where we find a character with  proletarian/plebeian/peasant roots who has risen in the world. And, as Balzac put it, the secret behind many a great fortune is a crime that was never found out.

It seems Simenon was hitting his stride around this time. The characters are all interesting and the plot is relatively tight. I’m not sure what to think of Maigret’s outburst of violence at the end, but maybe that’s his peasant blood reasserting itself. Plus he’d earlier shown that he could take a punch himself and shrug it off. If you’re going to dish it out you have to be able to take it.

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I guess Maigret didn’t retire, as he’s back as Paris’s celebrity police investigator here. Even to the point where a young man has come all the way from Philadelphia just to learn about his “method.” Good luck with that. “How can I explain it to you?” Maigret asks. “I feel it.” But then how can you explain anything to a man who won’t wear a hat, even in the rain? Americans!

Though one of the longer Maigret mysteries I still felt shortchanged. I thought there was so much more to say about what was going on in that Neapolitan ice cream apartment building. As it stands, it’s pretty clear who the good guys and the bad guys are, though the focus on a smaller cast of characters and a single setting gives you more to sink your teeth into. The idea of love changing to avarice, “one passion chases out another,” made me think of Trina in Frank Norris’s McTeague. I love these pocket case studies in abnormal psychology.

As I say, I would have been happy with a few hundred pages going deeper into all this. But Simenon seems to have had a kind of attention-deficit problem when it came to these books. He’ll set the hook with a delightful opening, as he does here with an evocation of the foggy Paris streets to kick things off, or again at the beginning of Chapter 8:

It was still raining in the morning, a soft, dismal rain with the resignation of widowhood. You didn’t see it falling; you didn’t feel it, yet it covered everything with a cold film, and the surface of the Seine was pitted with thousands of little circles. At nine, you still felt as if you were off to catch an early train, for day was reluctant to dawn, and the gas lamps were still lit.

But he never continues in this vein for more than a paragraph or two. He’s impatient to get on with the story. Why the rush?

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Yes, it’s just Maigret. I wonder if Simenon was starting to have doubts about the project at this point, tossing off a title like that.

Well, the big guy is enjoying a cozy retirement with Madame Maigret when his nephew, a newly minted detective on the Paris police force, badly bungles a stake-out. So badly, indeed, that he’s charged with murder. So Maigret is dragged back into action to clear the poor idiot out.

A bit of a change from the usual fare, as we basically know whodunit from the start. It’s more along the lines of a crime story than it is a mystery. Amadieu, Maigret’s replacement, even explains how Maigret’s “usual method” doesn’t apply here: “Usually, you get involved in people’s lives; you try to understand their thinking and you take as much interest in things that happened to them twenty years earlier as you do in concrete clues. Here, we’re faced with a bunch about whom we know pretty much everything.”

Instead of using his powers of empathy and reasoning Maigret has to resort to some old-school trickery involving the use of a piece of broom handle and a telephone. Even then, he’s really flying by the seat of his pants. But does this mean he’s back?

Maigret index

The curtain rises, by way of a nice analogy to the movement of fish, on a working-class riverside neighbourhood that has the appearance of “a stage set or rather a self-contained world heavy with reality.” That attention to setting doesn’t mean much in terms of plot, but it does suggest a kind of fish-bowl like focus on the Charenton neighbourhood Maigret has been called to, a focus complemented by the fact that there are only a couple of characters we spend any time with. This is a minimalist Maigret and it plays well alongside the usual jerkiness of the prose. At least we don’t feel like we’re being jerked around such great distances.

Émile Ducrau isn’t one of Simenon’s more interesting or complex creations, in my opinion, and what’s odd is how we’re supposed to read Maigret’s response to him. Even before their first meeting, on discovering evidence of Ducrau’s boorishness, Maigret is beaming with pleasure. Later, as audience to further displays of just how obnoxious Ducrau is, our hero is described as “reveling in the company of someone who was really worth knowing.” In what regard? In what ways, aside from the physical (which is always important in these books), is he a match for Maigret? Why the build up to so many of their “man to man” conversations, turning them into epic competitions? One can understand Ducrau’s respect for Maigret, but is it reciprocated? By the end Maigret will see in the blasted Ducrau something “tragic but also rather ridiculous and contemptible.” But has this been a tragic fall? Ducrau had been a pig right from the start. A rich pig, but still a pig. So what does Maigret see in him that’s so fascinating or enjoyable? In Maigret at Picratt’s there will be an even more extreme example of this odd sort of connection being made, with Maigret finding a sleazy strip-club operator to be disturbingly simpatico. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to take this.

And what’s this about Maigret retiring? How old is he anyway? I’m sure that’s not going to last. There’s still a rather long shelve of books to get through.

Maigret index