Maigret and the Minister is a bit of a change-up, being more of a political novel than the other books in the series. Maigret doesn’t care much for politics, or politicians, so when he gets called in by a government minister to investigate the theft of a politically explosive document he doesn’t relish the assignment one bit. He’d rather be dealing with the usual criminal types, feeling at one point “almost fond of the petty thieves maniacs, swindlers, and offenders of all kinds that he usually had to deal with.”

Making matters worse is the role of a press baron in all of this. Because if there’s one group of people that, then as now, people tend to like even less than politicians it’s the media. Who will win this race to the bottom?

Fitting the broader, more public scope of the proceedings there’s also a larger cast, with lots of incidental characters. This is compounded by what Maigret sees as the almost comic competition between Maigret’s team – the Police Judiciaire, headquartered at Quai des Orfèvres – and the Sûreté on Rue des Saussaies. I’m afraid I’m not clear on the distinction between these two organizations. I think Maigret is in a division of the Paris police and the other investigators are federal, but that might be the wrong way around.

Once everything gets unwrapped, however, things settle down into the usual round of Maigret and his deputies wearing out some shoe leather following people about and interviewing suspects until the solution just sort of comes to the Chief Inspector. It’s one of those things where he only needs to be reminded of something that’s been sitting at the back of his mind all along.

Also as usual, the chief villain will have to wait to get their full comeuppance. As for Maigret, he’s happy to wash the stink of politics off his hands and get back to his liars, murderers, and thieves.

Maigret index

A Jane Doe is found dead on the streets of Paris. It’s on Lognon’s beat but Maigret takes an interest. The Eeyore of the Paris police can never catch a break.

Not one of the better Maigret novels. The victim’s back story is unnecessarily exotic and the resolution is abrupt and kind of ridiculous. I did like the introduction of a leitmotif of old ladies looking for young female companionship in the middle section, even though nothing much is done with it. I remember when I was a kid there would still be older women advertising for female companions to take with them to Europe and other destinations. I’m not sure that sort of thing still happens anymore. It seems like something out of the world of Agatha Christie. In this book it comes across as decadent and almost predatory behaviour. But then the same sort of power imbalance is reflected in the dead girl’s one Paris friendship as well. Before she even got to the mean streets of the big city she was already a victim several times over. There are few things as sad as a life that’s caught in a rut. They never end well.

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I had a class there.

Over at Goodreports I’ve added a double review of a couple of books that look at some of the problems currently facing higher education: Stefan Collini’s Speaking of Universities and Robert Boyers’s The Tyranny of Virtue.

This is a subject that interests me. I’ve never been an academic but I know quite a few and when we meet up I often get an earful about what’s happening on campus. It’s not a happy story, especially when it comes to the Humanities. In my review I make the comparison to the dying congregations of mainstream Christian churches. I have friends who are ministers and I’ve always found it interesting how so many of their concerns intersect with what’s happening in higher ed.

Unfortunately, decline brings out the worst in people. Hence all of the bizarre and very nasty moral posturing that has become so prominent on campuses, and the compromises made by the old guard in order to hold on to the perks of privilege. I call this the twitch of the death nerve. Again I feel like my minister friends when they look at the more popular churches today that are filled with (and fueled by) righteousness and anger while deriding “lukewarm Christianity.” As they put it, that’s not the kind of church they used to know, just as today’s university is not the one I attended thirty years ago.

I’m sad to see what’s happening. I wish things were different. But I feel the same way about the Humanities today as I do about the CBC: a good idea that somehow lost its way, to the point where now it scarcely seems worth bothering with let alone supporting. It’s all so disappointing.

In my notes on the previous Maigret novel, Maigret’s Mistake, I started off by mentioning the fact that there are recurring characters in the series. One of these is the innocent man on the run. Such a fugitive even shows up in Maigret’s Mistake, in the form of the deceased’s boyfriend.

In almost every case these guys are just red herrings. In Maigret Goes to School the story is kicked off by another, the village schoolmaster Joseph Gastin, who everyone in the village of Saint-André seems eager to convict for the murder of the village scold. We can be pretty sure he’s innocent though, and he’s soon packed off the district jail while Maigret goes looking for the real killer.

Not a very interesting entry. The mechanics of how the old lady got shot, and who saw it happen, depend on being able to visualize a complicated physical setting. I don’t know if a map or drawing would have helped. Once again the people of the village close ranks and it’s up to Maigret to somehow pierce their defensive shell. Once again he feels personally challenged, this time by the deputy mayor.

There he was, planted in the middle of the village like a malicious god who knew everything that happened inside people’s heads and homes, enjoying the show put on for him in solitary pleasure.

He saw Maigret more as an equal than as an enemy.

“You’re a very shrewd man,” he seemed to say. “You pass for a champion at your game. In Paris, you find out everything anyone tries to hide from you.

“Only I’m a shrewd man, too. And here, I’m the one who knows.

“Try! Play your game. Question people. Worm their secrets out of them.

“We’ll see if you ever figure anything out!”

But in the end it’s not as hard as all that.

Maigret index

In Revolutions I made a reference to something I like to think of as the Rule of Ten, which I’d first put forward in an earlier essay. Here’s what I said:

Several years ago, in an essay I wrote for Canadian Notes & Queries, I made the point that literary talent typically burns brightly for a decade: “Most writers – not all, but most – are, as Faulkner once put it, ‘hot’ for only a little while. Faulkner himself went through this phase in the 1930s. Hemingway in the 1920s. It usually lasts about ten years.” This was, it seemed to me, such an obvious observation it scarcely needed elaboration. If any were needed, Robert McCrum supplied it when he echoed my thoughts in the pages of the Guardian:

“The truth about most so-called literary careers is that they last 10 years, if you’re lucky. Look at Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad. They all had “careers,” but when you look more closely at the trajectory of literary success, you find that its parabola describes, at best, a decade of creativity. Austen had completed the drafts of her greatest books by the age of 30. Dickens’s supreme decade was 1850 (David Copperfield) to 1860-61 (Great Expectations). With Conrad, Heart of Darkness came out in 1899. An astonishing decade (Nostromo; Secret Agent etc.) followed. But after 1909, there’s really only Under Western Eyes, and nothing else of equal stature. Shakespeare clinches this argument. Hamlet was probably written in 1600, after an extraordinary year in which . . . he also wrote As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Henry V. Thereafter, all the great tragedies appeared in an astoundingly short span. By the end of that decade he was done. The Tempest was given at court in November 1611.”

Are there exceptions to the Rule of Ten? Of course. Alice Munro may be one, though even here, I would argue, there has been some significant dropping off. But the exceptions prove the general rule, and it’s one that holds much the same everywhere in the English-speaking world. One only has to glance across the pond to see a stable of at-one-time major authors – Rushdie, McEwan, Amis – who, since the millennium (at the latest), have done very, very little to burnish their credentials for entry into the literary pantheon. In the U.S., the record has been just as grim. Every publishing season duly brings forth the latest offerings of that nation’s aging literary lions. But who, aside from someone needing to fill a book column, could even begin to get excited by anything written by Philip Roth after The Human Stain? Anything written by Thomas Pynchon after . . . The Crying of Lot 49? . . . no, let’s be nice and say Mason & Dixon. Anything written by Don DeLillo after Underworld, or (and here I know I’m treading on holy ground, but someone needs to say it), anything written by Cormac McCarthy after Blood Meridian? Yes, the big awards continued to pile up. And yes, newspapers continued to run fawning interviews with these titans, reviews gushing over any fresh evidence of their genius. But this was only to prolong a farce that, in all of these cases, had gone on more than long enough. As though, faced with the spectacle of aging, punch-drunk, and pot-bellied boxers coming out of retirement only to stagger on unsteady legs while being clobbered around the ring and into dementia, we should have turned and looked away, saddened and a bit sick at the pathetic spectacle.

This past week I had occasion to think again about the Rule of Ten as two examples came up. In Claire Tomalin’s new biography The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World she focuses on the young Wells both because the formation of a great writer is always more interesting than their decline, and because all of Wells’ major work was done by 1910.

Given that his first novel, The Time Machine, had come out in 1895 this gave him an effective career of fifteen years. Close enough, and I think if you took out Tono-Bungay (1909) you’d have a good argument for making the cut-off date 1905, thus satisfying the Rule of Ten pretty neatly.

The second item was a Robert Gottlieb piece in the New York Times on Sinclair Lewis, “The Novelist Who Saw Middle America as It Really Was.” In Lewis’s case the Rule was strictly in operation, with his vital years running from Main Street (1920) to Dodsworth (1929). Like Wells, Lewis would go on being a celebrity author and keep publishing for decades, but nothing much would come of it. Lewis in particular was a wreck at the end, the sort of sad spectacle I mentioned as being the general rule.

I think everyone is aware of the Rule of Ten, including authors themselves, though it’s not something they like to talk about. It’s interesting that one workaround that has been effected in our own time is for bestselling authors to effectively become brands. This allows for the same names to dominate the bestseller lists not just year after year but decade after decade. Testimony, I think, to the power of the brand in our economy, since in most if not every case the authors in question are far removed from their best work, and in some instances aren’t even the authors of the books being published under their name.

But sales are one thing and critical reception another. As I said five years ago: “Yes, the big awards continued to pile up. And yes, newspapers continued to run fawning interviews with these titans, reviews gushing over any fresh evidence of their genius.” Why? Doesn’t everything we know about how these things play out suggest we should ignore writers at this point, just as Tomalin wisely skips the later Wells? Wouldn’t it make more sense to move on?

While the Maigret novels have lots of recurring themes and character types, Simenon kept them fresh with a good mix of complex psychological case studies. A good example is the monstrous Dr. Gouin in Maigret’s Mistake. In general terms he’s another of Simenon’s spoiled man-babies, waited upon by codependent women. But in being a world-famous surgeon he magnifies this, becoming a kind of cult leader to a harem whose members compete with one another to serve and protect him. He’s also sexually insatiable in a passionless way, which is the very quality that gets him into trouble.

The contest between Maigret and Gouin is a similarly bloodless affair. Like Maigret, Gouin is a God-the-Father figure, but his arrogance sets him apart. Maigret sees himself, at least in this book, as more like the Son, descending to the human level so that he can empathize with the people he’s investigating. Gouin wants to remain above humanity and is only interested in using others, in particular homing in on people who want to be used.

Not a particularly gripping entry in the series, and I thought it jumped the rails a bit in the final pages. I don’t believe in Madame Gouin turning against her husband like that. But then jealousy might have won out over her martyr complex.

Maigret’s mistake? I think it was drinking a glass of marc in the early going. Marc is pomace brandy, or so I’m told, and once Maigret starts a case drinking one particular type of alcohol – calvados, beer, red wine, or whisky – he feels he has to keep drinking the same until the case is wrapped up. A curious but endearing superstition. But he doesn’t even like marc! Poor Maigret.

Maigret index

You know you’re in a bit of a rut when you can cut and paste the header from the previous year’s Books of the Year round-up. But here it is:

I have to begin with a disclaimer. I read a lot of books in 2020, but not very many new books. And in particular not a lot of fiction (outside of SF). This is something that I’ve noticed is only getting worse. I’d like to read more new fiction, but much of it seems to be getting lost in the shuffle of pages.

In 2021 this trend continued. I shouldn’t be surprised. At some point I think every committed reader starts to think about the number of books they have left in them, which then leads to a deeper consideration of where one’s time is best spent. And that time is usually not best spent reading new books. Still, I would like to do better in 2022. There’s always hope!

Best fiction: Looking back on 2021, I guess one way of picking a winner here is thinking of the book I remember the best. I know that’s only one criteria, but I think it’s an important one. And if I had to pick the work of fiction that’s stuck in my head the most it would be Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall, which is another working of the recently very hot field of Weird fiction in Canadian writing.

Best non-fiction: I will go with The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow just for its sweep, provocative point of view, and readability. I will then rush to add that it’s a book that I had a lot of disagreements with. Much of it I think is just wrong. But it’s a book of the year.

Best SF: Quite a few titles suggest themselves here but I’ll go with Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom. This is maybe stretching the idea of a new book a bit since it’s a collection of stories written in the 1980s (Suzuki committed suicide in 1986), but I think they’re mostly new translations and the book itself is new. In any event, I really liked it and even found it a bit surprising that what I thought one of the freshest and most groundbreaking SF titles of the year was actually written forty years ago.

Though a boy from the provinces (his father was a rural estate manager), Maigret is as closely identified with Paris as you can imagine, even if he also gets around quite a bit: traveling to the U.S. in Maigret in New York and Maigret at the Coroner’s and England in Maigret’s Revolver. That said, the books I like the best are the more village-cozy ones where he finds himself in some small provincial town having to investigate a crime involving the corrupt or degenerate local big-wigs. Which is where Maigret is Afraid lands us.

Maigret isn’t really afraid. At least he isn’t afraid for himself. His fear is more like concern for the welfare of some particularly vulnerable individuals. He arrives in Fontenay to visit an old friend and immediately finds himself investigating a series of murders. The town, which is understandably on edge, is also deeply polarized along class lines (“Maigret had rarely experienced such cliqueyness”) and the proles have turned against the family living in the grand old manor house that dominates the high street.

That family is, in turn, an extreme example of decadence, their gentility now submerged in shabbiness and possibly insanity. Even the hired help have turned against them, which is less of a surprise given that they (the help) aren’t getting paid.

Speaking of the help, I always like the little nods in books like these to the social protocols of the time. It’s like when you see servants tucking in their upper class masters at bedtime in the novels of Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse. Of course most of this is gone now, and for good reason. For example, why would you even want someone else to run your bath for you, as the hotel chambermaid does here for Maigret? How would they know what temperature you wanted it?

Though it’s a classic set-up, the plot here is a bit nutty, and stays off-focus as Maigret is more concerned with his friend the town magistrate than he is with what’s going on with the slayings. The magistrate’s problem? Madame Maigret thinks it’s the fact that he never married. Is her judgment apt, or is the magistrate just another illustration of men not being able to live with women or without them? The book seems to suggest that you’re damned either way.

Maigret index

I wonder how relieved Maigret feels that he didn’t have kids. He does mention here that he had a daughter who didn’t survive, which I’m sure is a source of regret, but in so many of the cases he investigates kids are what get people into trouble.

The reference to his daughter, by the way, comes during a courtroom scene where Maigret is being interrogated by a defence lawyer about having struck the accused after taking him into custody. “At one point I boxed his ears, as I might have done my own son,” he admits. There’s a bit that hasn’t worn well.

I like the story though. Louis Thouret is found dead, stabbed in the back in an alley. How did he get there? As Maigret pieces together the last few years of Thouret’s life he discovers that he had led a dual life, along the lines of the Michael Douglas character in the movie Falling Down or John Lanchester’s novel Mr. Phillips. It all comes from having to keep up appearances, which is something Louis’ wife nagged him about. These are the sort of people Maigret is most drawn to in the Parisian crowd:

In former days what had struck, you might even say romantically inspired, him about this crowd in perpetual movement were those people who, discouraged, defeated and resigned, had given up on life and been swept along by the flow.

Since then he had come to know them, and they were no longer the ones who made the biggest impression on him; rather, those who did were on the rung above, the decent, honest, inconspicuous types who struggled day in, day out to stay afloat, or to foster the illusion, the belief, that they really existed and that life was worth living.

Maigret and the Man on the Bench is also one of those books where the action is driven by predatory and cruel women, and the men who try to appease them. In our own time the bathrobe has come to seem like the uniform of the man on the make; in Maigret novels it’s more often a woman in a dressing gown with a breast falling out. I should have kept count at the start of this series of how many times this happens. It’s usually just a depressing attempt at seduction by some vamp who doesn’t realize that Maigret can’t be tempted in that sort of way (they’d do better by offering him a drink). In fact, he is usually repelled by boobs, as here when visiting a woman of a certain age and noticing how “one of her breasts – always the same one, soft and wobbly like bread dough – had a tendency to slip free of her dressing gown.”

I wonder how critical a comment that is meant to be. I think a breast like bread dough would be pretty firm for a woman over 50.

This was a good one, though the ending is presented as a sort of afterthought. I think the lesson learned is not to flash your cash around, especially in certain neighbourhoods. Also don’t have kids unless you’re prepared to slap them about to keep them in line.

Maigret index

When you’re as famous a detective as J.-J. Maigret (that’s Jules-Joseph) you don’t have to go looking for trouble; it comes to your door. In this case it takes the form of a disturbed young man who drops in at his apartment and is entertained by Madame Maigret for a while but who leaves before the Detective Chief Inspector arrives, taking with him Maigret’s revolver.

I have to say, Maigret doesn’t come away from this initial bit of business that’s used to get the plot rolling looking very good. Why doesn’t he rush home when his wife calls him? Why does he stop on his way at a brasserie to have a few pastis with a colleague? Later he will apologize – to the young man! – for not getting back more quickly. Meanwhile, it is Madame Maigret who wants to apologize for not keeping the young man at the apartment, while she’s having to cook Maigret’s lunch at the same time.

I guess it’s a minor point, but like I say, it doesn’t show our hero in a good light. Or later when the couple are walking to a friend’s place for dinner and she has to tell him “Don’t walk so fast,” because “He always walked too quickly for her.” Always? How long have they been married? Wouldn’t he know this by now and slow his pace when out with his wife?

All of this is by the way, but it is something I tripped over in the opening pages. Once the story gets going here it has Maigret pursuing the young man, and his revolver, to London, where Maigret meets up with cross-Channel colleague Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard, who we remember from My Friend Maigret. But as usual any attempt at establishing a Maigret chronology is frustrated by the offhand remark that “they had not seen each other for some time.” How long a time? Don’t know.

In my notes on Maigret and the Old Lady I speculated on whether or not Maigret could be considered an alcoholic. That’s a thought I had again here, especially when he’s stuck staking out the lobby of the Savoy Hotel, with the bar closed. Then when the bar opens he can’t get to it! This, this is torture:

His throat was swollen with thirst and from where he stood he could see the bar full of customers, the pale martinis, which from a distance looked so cool in their clouded glasses, and the whiskies that the men standing at the bar were holding in their hands.

You can bet this is a thirst that water isn’t going to relieve. And in fact when he later has dinner with the young man he’s been hunting and the young man only orders water Maigret looks down on him as a child. Grown-ups order a bottle with their meals, and if the young man doesn’t want any then that just means more for Maigret.

A quick read with a silly plot that wraps up without much of a conclusion. Alas, as Maigret has to concede, he is not God the Father but only head of the Crime Squad. A mere mortal who needs to stop off on his way home for a few drinks and who gets parched standing in a hotel lobby.

Maigret index