A Maigret Christmas is a seasonal novella published in 1951, during a period when Simenon was toodling about the U.S. The action all takes place on Christmas Day, with Maigret only leaving his apartment once, and that just to go across the street. So it’s a tidy little drama as well as “a family affair” since Madame Maigret is always about, knitting or cooking and just generally helping out in any way she can.

The mystery starts out promising. A little girl in an apartment across the way is disturbed to find Santa Claus in her bedroom, tearing at the floorboards. Santa gives her a doll as a present, but apparently doesn’t find what he was looking for. Will he be back?

I was expecting, from such a set-up, that A Maigret Christmas would be something cute. A confection. But it’s actually a run-of-the-mill Maigret story with a melancholy overlay. The detective chief inspector even wakes up Christmas morning feeling depressed.

The Maigrets have no children of their own and their disappointment in this regard is sometimes lightly registered in the other novels. But here it is front and center. The little girl across the street has been basically adopted by her uncle and aunt because her father is a drunken wreck. But her aunt doesn’t want her. So you have a child who needs parents and the Maigrets needing a child. At the end they’ll take the girl in “on loan,” which is no consolation to Madame Maigret, who at the end breaks down in tears, not of joy. Making it a very Maigret Christmas indeed.

Maigret index

Another year where I have to preface this list with the observation that I didn’t read much literary fiction this year. To be sure, the last year has been rough, but even so I’ve more and more had the adage that “old men don’t read new fiction” brought to my attention. I do still spend a lot of time with the classics, and even more time with non-fiction. But outside of science fiction, a regular beat, I haven’t kept up with new novels and short story collections. And at this point I’m not sure I see that changing. Oh well.

Best fiction: As noted, I don’t have a lot of titles in this category to pick among. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (and emphatically not its companion volume Stella Maris) was pretty good though. It’s written in his signature late style, which I find overdone, but that said, he’s one of the few really distinctive literary voices out there working at this level.

Best non-fiction: I was really impressed with Richard Overy’s Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931–1945 (which came out in 2021 in the U.K. but in 2022 over here). You wouldn’t think a single-volume history of the Second World War would be so thorough and include so much fresh thinking. Some subjects are just so large I’m sure we’ll never hear the last word on them.

Best SF: There was a lot of strong competition in this category again this year. I liked Dave Eggers’s The Every as a dark sequel to the already dark-enough The Circle, but for my pick of the year I’ll take Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker for the way it handled a number of complicated ideas in a deft, intelligent, and playful way.

These English translations of the Maigret corpus are very much English translations, meaning that they take certain British terms and usages for granted. Like the first floor being what Americans call the second floor. Or having meals like skate and black butter being served with beverages like grog. Or calling the island between the lanes of a roadway a “reservation.” I’d never heard of this meaning of “reservation” before, but found it defined in the O.E.D. as “A strip of land between the carriageways of a dual carriageway.” This made me wonder if people in the U.K. still call roads carriageways.

One particular Britishism that gets a workout in this book is “rise.” What this refers to is what on this side of the Atlantic we call a “raise.” That is, a bump in pay at work. I think I first heard “rise” on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album in the song “Money.”

Money, so they say,
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a rise it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away.

Just putting those lyrics in this post, “rise” came up as a grammar error. Whenever I listened to that song as a kid I always thought Roger Waters was just pronouncing “raise” in a funny British accent. But it’s actually spelled “rise” over there.

Well, the translator of Maigret and the Wine Merchant is Ros Schwartz, who has done more than a dozen of these Maigret books for Penguin, and she’s a Brit so it’s all fair. I sometimes wonder about translations of certain expressions though. Maigret often tells his inspectors to search a crime scene “with a fine-tooth comb.” Is that expression the same in French? I don’t know. (It is called a “fine toothcomb” in the next book, Maigret’s Madwoman, but I’m sure that must be a typo.)

I spent my time making notes on things like this because there’s no mystery at all to be solved in this book. The titular wine merchant is shot dead outside a Paris bordello, and it turns out that he’s a guy who everybody hated. The killer eventually gives himself up. That’s it. Maigret is under the weather throughout, grumpy and woolly-headed, but Madame Maigret is there to fetch his pipe, turn down his bed, and cook and serve his meals, like the aforementioned skate and black butter (which sounds disgusting) and braised calf’s liver à la bourgeoise (one of Maigret’s favourites).

Once again, our hero is looking into the lives of the morally degenerate upper class, which makes him uncomfortable. Meanwhile, the killer is a downwardly mobile (rapidly downwardly mobile) loser who might be a sort of class avenger but for the fact that he’s so pathetic. Even the wise and understanding Maigret can’t wait to see the last of him.

Is the killer a bit like a squirrel Maigret encountered once while on holiday? That’s the analogy that’s made. But it’s a strange one.

One day, in Meung-sur-Loire, when Maigret had been lounging in a deckchair, a squirrel had come down from the plane tree at the bottom of the garden.

At first, it had kept perfectly still and he could see its heart pounding beneath the silky fur on its chest. Then it crept a few centimetres closer and froze again.

While Maigret hardly dared breathe, the little red animal stared at him fixedly, seemingly fascinated by him, but its entire body remained taut, ready to flee.

It all unfolded as if in slow motion, step by step. The squirrel grew bolder, reducing the distance between them by a good metre. This cautious approach had gone on for more than ten minutes, and the squirrel had ended up barely fifty metres from Maigret’s dangling hand.

Did it want to be stroked?

Now this really did make me think that there’d been some mistake in the translation. I had to go back and re-read it several times to make sure I was getting it right. Barely fifty metres? I’d have trouble even identifying a squirrel at fifty metres, much less see its heart beating beneath the silky fur on its chest. In my daily walks squirrels often come up to within a couple of feet of me (that is, a single metre or less). I thought England was on the metric system, so there shouldn’t have been a problem there. Or is it just that squirrels, and French squirrels in particular, were more standoffish fifty years ago?

Maigret index

“Surrounded Islands” by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1983).

From Moderan (1971) by David R. Bunch:

It was May. Everything was up; everything was out; Central Seasons had handed that big iron switch to ON to send old winter reeling once again. The plastic snow sheets had turned over and under as wheels spun deep in the ground, and the spring yard sheets had come up and over on the drums in that fair and equal exchange that makes seasons switch no problem in our great Moderan. How Nature used to struggle to bloom those blooms up! Everything in conflict, fighting for a toe hold, beating the frost down or being beaten down . . . petty struggle . . . to nothing . . . and all so unnecessary. Now we have it all on giant drums with yard sheets, divided into four – winter part, spring part, summer part and fall – and turning a season up in plastic is just play now where once old Nature struggled . . . hard.

From The Dust Bowl (2012) by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns:

Though it originated on the northern Plains, they referred to it all as “Kansas dust.” And many of them quickly had ideas about how to stop it from blowing across the continent. A Chicago business believed covering the Plains with its waterproof paper might do the job, while a steel company in Pittsburgh thought its wire netting would work better. The Barber Asphalt Company of New Jersey estimated it could spread an “asphalt emulsion” over the land for $5 an acre. A woman from North Carolina suggested that shipping junk autos west would simultaneously beautify her state while stopping the wind erosion on the Plains.

Other ideas included building wind deflectors 250 feet high, or planting Jerusalem artichokes, or using rocks from the Rocky Mountains, or spreading leaves and garbage from eastern cities. Someone else proposed using concrete, with holes carefully placed for planting seeds. None of the suggestions seemed to take into consideration that the area in question was 100 million acres.

I’ve been reading most of these Maigret books in order, but I jumped way ahead by mistake and read this one immediately after finishing Maigret’s Holiday. This led to a bit of whiplash, as Maigret’s Holiday had been published in 1947 and Maigret and the Killer came out in 1969. I’d been jerked, along with the technophobic Maigret, from the France of peasants and horse-drawn carts (or at least la France profonde) into the swinging world of Paris chic and the murder of a young man with disturbingly long hair who might be David Hemmings from Blow-Up (1966), only armed with a tape recorder instead of a camera.

“A political matter?” the reporters ask. “A love affair?” No, just madness. In other words, a modern, ironic crime, without any explanatory narrative: one where evidence means nothing and Maigret does less work than usual in waiting for the solution to come to him in the form of a guilt-bound, pathetic Raskolnikov. A crime more of our own time then, for not signifying much of anything. Welcome to random days.

Maigret index