You can take Maigret out of Paris, and even out of France, but wherever he goes he’s still investigating the same sort of crimes using the same method. Even in NYC we have “the social mechanism” at work: a great fortune rooted in a historical crime that will only gradually come to the surface. Then, when it’s time for wrapping up, Maigret will realize that nothing has been accomplished so he’ll just let things go.

Maigret is out of his element in the Big Apple but he sticks to his plan of putting in lots of plodding footwork until the solution comes to him. “I let myself drift with the current, clutching here and there on a passing branch.” Which is actually a pretty good way of going at things. Claiming that he knows nothing (until he knows everything) is the same as saying that he likes to keep an open mind. The problem with most police investigations that go wrong is developing tunnel vision in the early going.

I thought that there might be some connection made to Cécile is Dead because in that novel an American had come to Paris to study Maigret’s method and Maigret looks up an American he’d met in France a few years earlier when he comes to New York. But they are different people (in Cécile is Dead the American had been Spencer Oats of the Philadelphia Institute of Criminology, while here it’s Special Agent O’Brien of the FBI). Also of some assistance is another one of those weird secondary characters scattered throughout the series, in this instance a sad, alcoholic former clown named Ronald Dexter. He makes up for the fact that the villains of the piece are mostly kept off-stage and aren’t very interesting anyway. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure at the end what wickedness had happened all those years ago. But, much like Maigret himself in the end, I didn’t care a whole lot either.

Maigret index

New word day! Fossick. Was stumped by this one when it came up in John Man’s The Gutenberg Revolution. Man uses it for the act of searching through a library. Apparently it’s a bit of Australian or New Zealand slang originally referring to looking for gold or gems by picking over abandoned mine workings. Its more general meaning is to search for by rummaging around. “Rummage” actually has a strange etymology as well, having its roots in a Middle English word for the stowing of cargo.

I don’t know why I can’t read philosophy. I find the subject matter interesting. And I can read about philosophy. I like books pitched at a general audience and surveys running from Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy to Anthony Gottlieb’s more recent The Dream of Reason and The Dream of Enlightenment. But when it comes the primary texts I find I can’t get more than a few pages — and I mean that literally I’m lucky to make it to page 3 — into works like Spinoza’s Ethics, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Heidegger’s Being and Time. Most of Plato outside of the shorter dialogues is a tough slog and Aristotle even harder. Hegel and Wittgenstein I’ve given up on. The Pragmatists are more approachable, but I still find myself just wanting a précis or a book about them so that I don’t have to bother reading what they actually wrote.

I wonder if this is why Existentialism became so popular. I do like reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche most of the time, and Dostoyevsky and Camus were first-rate novelists. I read all these guys, and Sartre, because I enjoy them. The rest of the philosophical tradition comes to me by way of the aforementioned general histories and listening to lectures.

Some of this might be a temperamental difference. I didn’t care about literary theory or the philosophy of language when I was at school, and I still don’t. I found most of it both impenetrable and, what was even worse, irrelevant to any deeper understanding of the literature I was studying. But I do find broader questions about subjects like ethics and epistemology interesting. I’m at least curious about a lot of what philosophy does, or used to do.

I’m left to wonder though if I’m really missing anything by just reading summaries of these other major works rather than trying to engage with them directly. I think anyone who tries to get by reading a summary (most likely a Wikipedia page) on Paradise Lost is never going to understand the poem at all. Is the same the case with not reading Quine?

This is a question that bothers me a bit, but at this point I just have to accept that I’ve given up on reading much philosophy. I’m going to have to engage with these thinkers second-hand. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to figure them out on their own terms. Maybe I don’t have the attention span necessary to follow them (I like to browse Schopenhauer’s aphorisms, but have never tackled The World as Will and Idea). Or maybe philosophers just can’t express themselves clearly enough, or in a way that’s interesting enough, to make me want to pursue them any further. Life is short, and getting shorter all the time.

I don’t know if there’s a through narrative holding all of these Maigret novels together. As this one begins he’s two years into his retirement. Was this his second retirement? I wonder if anyone has worked out a Maigret chronology. They probably have but I’m too lazy to look for it. [Note: This is an issue that’s later addressed in Maigret’s Memoirs, where “Maigret” complains about the way Simenon jumbles up the chronology of his life.] I also wonder if the mention of an earlier investigation in the Haute Seine was a reference to Lock No. 1. How well do these books hold together?

In any event, Maigret gets tempted out of retirement here not by the big pile of money he’s offered but because the case interests him. Soon, however, it disgusts him. It’s yet another case involving “the social mechanism,” a.k.a. “the dodgy dealings of those who [grow] rich.” Ernest Malik is one such riser, and as so often happens (see what I said in my notes on The Cellars of the Majestic) he’s done it in ways that at best show a lack of scruple.

The crimes are described as a “vile business, which, from start to finish, was all a filthy matter of money.” If you’re born with money you’re decadent; if you have to get it you’re a crook. Either way, money just provides a sham façade to hide family skeletons behind. “For that is all there was behind those beautiful houses with their immaculate gardens: money!” Note how, at the beginning, the lady who hires Maigret mistakes him for a gardener. Detective or gardener, in either role he’s just cleaning up after rich people. I’m not surprised he’s sick of it.

Maigret index

A weak entry. It had promise as something a little different, with Maigret’s adversary not being the killer (who never even appears on stage) but a young woman with an imagination shaped by romance and detective fiction. Set in the “make-believe village” of a retirement community full of “toy houses” (not unlike how our hero saw the town of Delfzijl in A Crime in Holland) the potential for some kind of postmodern Maigret was there. But the events are far-fetched and the resolution just a confusing whirl of telephone calls describing actions that are hard to follow. In the end I wasn’t sure how seriously Simenon wanted us to take it. The character of Félicie is problematic to say the least, but Maigret adores her. Should we? To only be amused at her behaviour strikes me as little better than the delight the decadent heiress has in the machinations of Madame Le Cloagulen in Signed, Picpus. Is their only difference one of class?

Maigret index