I don’t know if it’s because Simenon liked writing about them or because I like reading about them more, but his Maigret novels with wicked women as the villains are my favourites. It works (for me) again here as Maigret and his wife are on vacation taking the waters at Vichy, which is where a mysterious woman he had noticed as always dressed in lilac is found strangled one morning.

The heavies are the dangerously independent, and “self-satisfied,” Lange sisters. What a pair of schemers they are! We feel it’s only right that the elder Lange is killed, and Maigret even hopes the guy who did her in is acquitted. I can hear him muttering “What a bitch!” as he did at the end of Signed, Picpus.

It’s not much of a mystery, as there’s only one suspect and Maigret is led to him quickly through some rather random deductions. For example, that the phone caller needs time to arrange a meet-up is attributed immediately to the fact that he “must be married,” which isn’t an obvious connection to make. The back story is interesting though, playing like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for grifters, and it moves along in a tight, suspenseful manner. On the copyright page it says it was first published serially (in Le Figaro), which I don’t think was usual up to this point. At least I didn’t see any notes to that effect in the other books I checked. Given that there were two or three Maigret novels being published every year, serial publication wasn’t really necessary.

Perhaps a week at the spa was just what the doctor ordered in more ways than one, as this was the first really good Maigret story in a while, and I think stands as one of the better in the series. Bad women really brought out the best in our man.

Maigret index

It was in my review of Maigret Sets a Trap that I first remarked on how much significance Maigret puts on married couples sleeping in separate bedrooms. It’s something that the detective chief inspector often finds himself taking note of in these books, and when we find out here that Émile Parendon and his wife aren’t sleeping together we can only take it as a red flag. It’s the flip side of how much time Simenon spends describing Maigret and Madame Maigret together in bed, which is obviously something he holds up as a kind of domestic ideal.

I liked reading Maigret Hesitates, though it’s representative of most of the later books in this series in that the ending was a lot less interesting than the build-up. The premise here had a lot of potential, with Maigret receiving an anonymous note in which a murder is announced. He investigates the grand old house from which the letter came and finds the usual family of rich eccentrics. It all seems building up to something neat, but then the murder itself is more of an accident and all the preliminaries, like the emphasis on Article 64 of the Penal Code, are made irrelevant. At least they seem irrelevant to me. Maigret apparently thinks Article 64 has some application to the murder, though I’m not sure what.

More than that though, Simenon just isn’t creating interesting psychological types anymore. Even a couple as weird as the Parendons are strange without being relatable or compelling. Nor is there anything interesting in the family relations. So what you get is an entertaining read, but the odd elements (like the letters and the Article 64 obsession) don’t add up and there’s no big payoff.

Maigret index

Thank goodness! I don’t consider Maigret’s Pickpocket to be one of the best Maigret books, but considering how dull and contrived the series had been getting, it was nice to have one that I enjoyed. There were lots of questions to ponder, not just whodunit, but whether Ricain had talent or was just a poseur, and how loyal his wife actually was. That these ancillary questions are never answered didn’t bother me a bit. In fact, they made me like the book even more.

François Ricain is the pickpocket, a young man of modest means trying to make it in the film business in Paris. The odds of him getting a break seem long indeed, and he’s settled down into a shabby Bohemian existence, living with his wife in an oddly-appointed apartment and scrounging among friends to make enough money to pay his rent. One day he steals Maigret’s wallet but returns it the next day. This is because his wife has been shot and he needs Maigret’s help.

(As a quick aside, Maigret has his wallet stolen because he keeps it in his back pocket. Madame Maigret has told him not to do this but he doesn’t listen. For the life of me I don’t know why anyone keeps their wallet in their back pocket. I have never in my life kept my wallet in my back pocket. That’s just stupid.)

As you’d probably guess by this point, Maigret doesn’t like this particular crowd. Nor do any of the other upstanding citizens of Paris. After making inquiries, the words that come up most often to describe them are: “savages, badly brought-up people, no morals.” And it’s not just the young people. The older producer who takes advantage of the system crosses a line with Maigret:

“Tell me, Monsieur Carus. I imagine that you have a procession of pretty girls coming into your office every day. And most of them would do anything to get a part in a film.”

“Very true.”

“And I’m guessing that you may sometimes take advantage of your visitor.”

“I don’t hide it.”

“Even from Nora?”

“Let me explain. If now and then I take advantage, as you put it, of a pretty girl, Nora doesn’t worry too much, as long as it doesn’t last. It comes with the job. All men do the same thing, though they don’t all have the same opportunity. Yourself, chief inspector . . .”

Maigret looked at him forbiddingly, without smiling.

“Oh please forgive me if I shocked you. Where was I? . . .”

The killer is the sort of loser that Simenon seems to have had a special dislike for: intelligent but bitter about going nowhere and carrying about a sense of grievance and humiliation. The thing that’s new here is that this is a description not only of the killer but of most of his friends as well. Which makes you think that a larger breakdown was occurring in Paris in . . . 1967. The shit was about to hit the fan.

Maigret index

Michelangelo (or is it?) by Daniele da Volterra, c. 1545.

Regular readers of this irregular blog will know that I have a passing interest in the way celebrities or people in positions of power seek to manage and control their image or “narrative,” both in their dealings with the media and with biographers. For earlier takes, see here and here. It really is a fascinating subject.

Giorgio Vasari may have invented the biography of the artist with the publication in 1550 of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, English translations of which are still in print. This is a collection of biographies or biographical sketches of famous artists of the Italian Renaissance, many of whom Vasari knew. Vasari thought of the arts as progressing, mainly through the technical achievements, and as the culminating figure of the story of Renaissance art he placed Michelangelo, someone who he considered to be sent by God, if not divine himself.

That wasn’t good enough. It never is.

I was reading The Lost Battles by Jonathan Jones recently and had to smile at this:

Michelangelo read this [Vasari’s book] and was ambivalent. Having sent Vasari a poem praising him for bringing so many dead artists back to life, he got his own pupil Ascanio Condivi to take a break from making paintings based on Michelangelo’s drawings in order to write an official life of his master.

Condivi’s Life of Michelangelo, published in 1553, set out to correct errors in Vasari – and to overturn facts Michelangelo didn’t like, such as Vasari’s entirely accurate claim that he had been Ghirlandaio’s apprentice.

I love it! Imagine being so upset at a hagiographical life that you assign a subordinate to “correct” it by falsifying the record.

As I’ve said before, if you’re reading the bio of a living celeb (meaning one who still has the ability to have any influence over what someone is writing about them) you have to assume that it’s going to be, at best, only the loosest facsimile of the truth. It has always been thus.

Update, October 19 2023:

This is a subject that just keeps giving and giving.

I really should have enjoyed this one, and the fact that I didn’t was a clear indication to me that the series is played out.

The reason I thought I should have liked it is that it has such a narrow focus. Maigret is woken from a dream (he has an active dream life) by a phone call from his friend Dr. Pardon, who has had to do some emergency surgery on a mysterious couple who then disappear as soon as he sews the patient up. It turns out she had been shot. The next day her husband is found to have been shot as well, only fatally.

So the question is Who killed Félix Nahour? The wife? The wife’s lover? The maid? The seedy secretary? It’s a neat little mystery involving conflicting passions and loyalties, with all of the suspects lying to Maigret about pretty much everything.

Unfortunately, it’s a neat little mystery without a neat little solution. This is another one of those Maigret stories where the detective chief inspector just gets a feel for what’s going on and nails it. But how are we supposed to play along? What clues were tipping Maigret off? Especially since the double shooting was such a bizarre event in the first place. I also didn’t understand the motivation of the killer. They should have resolved their personal issues with Nahour long before things came to the point they did.

Maigret index

Filippo Argenti is down there somewhere.

In an earlier post I commended the analogy made by a First World War airman between the appearance of a battlefield and the geography of Dante’s Inferno. What I particularly liked was its literary precision. It didn’t just use “Dante’s hell” as shorthand for something very bad, but specifically drew a comparison between the tortured landscape he was flying above and the place where punishment was meted out to heretics.

I was thinking of that correct use of Dante recently while reading Sara Gay Forden’s The House of Gucci. In the first of two references to Dante in the book Forden pulls a line from Inferno to shine some light on the “bizarre Florentine or Tuscan spirit,” which is a very literal translation of some words (fiorentino spirito bizarro) used in Canto VIII that are used to describe Filippo Argenti.

That’s all Forden says, and it surprised me a bit because all I could remember of Filippo Argenti is that he was someone Dante (the poet) really hated, and who Dante (the pilgrim) found drowning in the bog of the Styx. I thought the use of the word bizarro probably meant something a little different than “bizarre,” at least as it was being used in the poem. On looking into the notes in Robert and Jean Hollander’s English translation of Inferno I found this:

The word bizarro, explains Boccaccio’s comment to this passage, in Florentine vernacular is used of people who “suddenly and for any reason at all lose their tempers.”

This makes sense in context because the Styx is where the wrathful are being punished. But I don’t think it’s what Forden meant. Especially since in the poem it refers to Argenti going into a kind of fit where he starts biting himself in rage.

The second time Forden mentions Dante made even less sense to me. Talking of the building that Guccio Gucci bought as a workshop, she quickly gives some of its history: “In 1642, the building was acquired by the cardinal and then the archbishop of Florence, Francesco de’Nerli, whom Dante mentions in his Divine Comedy.” How could Dante have mentioned a cardinal who was alive in 1642 in a poem written in the early years of the fourteenth century?

I’m not a Dante scholar. I never studied anything by him at school and I don’t know Italian. I shouldn’t be stumbling over things like this.

I mentioned in my notes on Maigret Defends Himself that it was basically the first of a two-part story arc, which concludes with Maigret’s Patience. The action picks up here a week later, with Maigret still on the trail of a gang of Paris jewel thieves, and re-visiting the Rue des Acacias apartment that’s home to the crippled ex-gangster Manuel Palmari and his saucy girlfriend Aline. Alas, it’s not a happy occasion, as someone has just shot Palmari and it’s up to his old not-quite-friend but not-quite-adversary to find out whodunit.

This turns out to be not much fun. The fact is that in these later Maigret books none of the killers are terribly interesting case studies. Here they are just the same “wild animal” types we met back in Maigret and the Saturday Caller. I even thought I was well on my way to figuring things out ahead of schedule, but then things took a bizarre swerve into a crazy back story and it turns out I was wrong. Though the explanation I was coming up with would have been better. I hate it when that happens in a mystery novel.

Some odds and ends: (1) Champagne is “more or less the only drink that doesn’t tempt” the hard-drinking Maigret. (2) Palmari has a maid in to clean his apartment two hours a day every day, and all morning on Mondays and Saturdays. That seems like a lot of maid service. (3) Maigret, as is often noted in the series, can’t drive, and we’re told here it’s because he has a tendency to let his mind wander into reverie while working on a case. He’s a man who knows his limitations. (4) The concierge in an apartment building is a ubiquitous figure in many of these novels. It’s a job that never seems to have caught on in North America. Given how grumpy they all seem to be in Paris, that may be for the best.

Maigret index

The shoe is on the other foot when Maigret gets called into the principal’s office (that is, the office of the prefect of police) and finds out he’s been accused of getting the niece of a prominent public official drunk and raping her. It’s a #MeToo story circa. 1964, which would be kind of interesting but we all know our hero is being set up and the scheme is so improbable that its complexity is what finally convinces Maigret as to who’s behind it (he knows the villain’s “tendency, when faced with a problem, is to look for the subtlest, most complicated solution”). Add to that the fact that Maigret only becomes “a problem” due to “an almost miraculous combination of circumstances” and we have a very whimsical plot indeed.

I was kept interested, if only because as I got closer to the end I didn’t see how Simenon was going to wrap things up in the few pages remaining (and as it is, the subplot is only resolved in the next book, Maigret’s Patience, so what we have is a rare two-parter). Suffice it to say that Maigret gets some breaks as he begins to grow in weight and density, which is an observable phenomenon with him whenever a case starts to come together.

Things kick off with the Maigrets having dinner with the Pardons. We learn Dr. Pardon has stopped smoking cigarettes at home because his wife is worried about all these nasty rumours of cigs causing lung cancer. So instead he smokes cigars! This was what (some) people thought made sense in 1964.

From there we enter into a discussion of “truly wicked” criminals, whose only motivation is an inherent spite. This is a red herring, as the bad guy in this book has a motive. I like a bit of initial misdirection though, as it’s not often what you’re expecting.

Not to say the villain isn’t wicked enough. His crimes are only briefly outlined at the end, but recalled for me Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness. As for the complainant, Nicole, she could simply be dismissed with a muttered “bitch,” but might also be flagged as another example of Maigret’s take on degenerate youth. A student at the Sorbonne, she runs with a fast crowd, comes from a family of privilege, and clearly has little respect for the law or even basic morality. I’ve flagged before how Maigret (like Simenon?) was getting grumpier as the series went along, casting a particularly jaundiced eye on flashy young people. In this book Nicole is only a tool, but it’s a point worth flagging because I don’t think the kids are going to get any better from here on out.

Maigret index