For a series that went on for so long, I’m actually a little surprised that Simenon didn’t attempt to tie the different stories together more with recurring characters aside from Maigret, his wife, his regular stable of lieutenants (Janvier, Lucas, Lapointe, Torrence), and the sad sack Lognon. There’s little mention made in any of the individual novels to things that happened years, or decades, earlier – things that regular readers might be expected to remember.

Maigret’s Madwoman bucks this just a bit. For starters, the plot borrows heavily from Cécile is Dead, with the “madwoman” (she’s elderly but perfectly sane) coming to visit Maigret at the Quai des Orfèvres because she’s sure someone has been rummaging through her apartment. She then winds up dead, like the similarly concerned Cécile. Along the way there are more direct nods to other books in the series than this, but they come with slight changes, as though Simenon was testing his committed readers. When Maigret asks his wife if she ever talks to the people she meets while sitting in the park she can only “think of one time. A mother of a little girl, who asked me to look after the child for a few minutes while she went to buy something on the other side of the gardens.” I take it this is a reference to the events of Madame Maigret’s Friend, but in that book it was a little boy who Madame Maigret was asked to watch. And later Maigret will travel to Toulon where he meets up with Chief Inspector Marella, who reminds him of the “Porquerolles affair” of ten or twelve years earlier. What he means, I think, is the case described in My Friend Maigret, only the investigator who is Maigret’s liaison in that book is named Lechat.

I enjoyed these fillips for fans, and thought Maigret’s Madwoman a good read. It isn’t much of a mystery though, with the most likely suspect – a kid with long hair who plays in a rock band called Les Mauvais Garçons at the Bongo Club – only being outdone by an even more disreputable type who’s dropped in out of nowhere. The MacGuffin is a stretch, and I had trouble believing the bad guys thought they were going to be able to make anything out of the item they stole from the apartment, but greedy dreamers are like that. And in the end this is another case where Maigret just has to sadly walk away. Not so much out of sympathy for the killer’s accomplice, though some of that’s implied, but because he figures there’s no point in going after them.

Maigret index

This story is the last, and much the shortest, of the three seasonal pieces collected in A Maigret Christmas (the others being the title novella and Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook). Maigret himself doesn’t appear (he stays at home all day solving the mystery of the secret Santa across the street from his apartment), but we are briefly entertained by Inspector Hard-Done-By, that sad Eeyore of the Paris police, Lognon. At least he doesn’t have the sniffles and isn’t being shot at this time, though he is stuck working on Christmas Eve, and it looks like it’s going to be a late night when a man kills himself in a bar.

That suicide doesn’t turn out to have anything much to do with the rest of the story, which instead leaves the bar behind as a prostitute named Long Tall Jeanne spends her evening keeping a younger woman out of trouble by starting some of her own. So not a mystery at all but “A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups.” Jeanne does have a bit of Maigret about her though in the way she tries to steer a young person away from danger. That’s what good people do in this world.

Maigret index

There’s no “Maigret” in the title of this story/novella, because Maigret doesn’t appear in it. But it’s part of the A Maigret Christmas volume and takes place in the same universe since Janvier puts in an appearance, so I figured I should cover it.

In fact, the absence of Maigret is one of the less surprising aspects of the story. It’s entirely set in the police switchboard control room on Christmas day, with the staff on duty responding to calls coming in from all around Paris. Then a murdered body is found and one of the operators recognizes the name of the victim. It seems his brother may be involved.

It’s a clever idea to limit the action to the one room, with witnesses and reports being fed into that room bit by bit. You could imagine the thing being done on stage, or Hitchcock taking up the challenge of making something out of it on film. I’m not sure it works quite as well on the page, and the first chapter is a bit confusing, but it’s certainly a change-up for the series and I think it’s nicely done.

It’s a neat story too, with a sort of double-manhunt plot that has the brother’s son intent on catching a serial killer while Janvier and the rest of the police try to find them. Also interesting is the man who’s been laid off trying to keep up appearances by still going out to work every night with his lunch pail. He’s someone we’d meet again in the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down and the John Lanchester novel Mr. Phillips. Was this the first appearance of such a character? It may well have been, as Un Noël de Maigret was first published in 1951 and I don’t think we really understood the condition yet.

Maigret index

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?

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“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

He’s not really Maigret’s “friend.” Though it’s interesting that everyone calls him that, assuming that he is. In fact, as Maigret constantly has to correct them, Léon Florentin was only a classmate, and one he looks on now with a mix of pity and resentment.

Given that weak personal connection, I was left a bit confused as to why Florentin would come to Maigret in the first place to get him to investigate a murder that he had some involvement in. This was much the way Maigret’s Pickpocket kicked off too, and I didn’t really understand it there either. Just laziness on Simenon’s part? I have to ask given the way the novel starts, with Maigret working at his desk with the window of his office open. He notices a fly buzzing about before “all of a sudden, as if it had had enough, it took flight and passed through the open window before losing itself in the warm air outside.” Maigret returns to annotating his reports when Florentin’s visit is announced and we’re told that he had “forgotten the fly, which, perhaps offended, must have flown out the window.” Well of course it flew out the window! We were just told so on the previous page! That’s lazy.

I’ve remarked before (in my notes on Maigret’s Patience) how often the character of the concierge in these novels is presented as a negative presence, though never an out-and-out villain. That’s the case again here, with a really ugly concierge who turns out to be the key that reveals the killer. She’s obese and scheming and resentful, possessed only of a sense of low cunning that Maigret has to work around in order to get at the truth. Were there any nice concierges in Paris or were they all this bad?

Maigret finds the whole thing so exasperating he breaks a pipe stem in his teeth at one point. This made me wonder how common an occurrence this is. Are pipe stems easily broken? I’d ask somebody, but I don’t know anyone who smokes a pipe. They seem to be very much a niche these days.

Not a great Maigret story, but it has some dramatic interest. Especially the way Maigret gathers all the deceased’s clients together so he can observe them interact. That was a nice bit of Poirot business. Though at one point Maigret’s philosophy on crimes of passion is expressed, and I think it’s a bit different than that held by Poirot:

He nearly told them that there are no such things as crimes of passion. And yet that was more or less what he believed. He had learned in the course of his career that the spurned lover or the abandoned wife will kill less out of love than out of a wounded pride.

Of course, wounded pride might lead to a crime of passion. It depends how sticky we’re going to be with definitions. Love and pride live next door to each other anyway.

Maigret index