Georges Simenon lived on a boat for a while, and spent a lot of time travelling through the French canal system. So he was probably grinning at the idea of setting a novel in this environment, with Maigret looking “to absorb the atmosphere, to capture the essence of canal life, which was so different from the world he knew.”

Personally, I don’t know a thing about canal life. I have a general idea of how canals and lock systems operate, but that’s it. This made my ability to visualize some of the action in this one difficult, making me think of Peter Mendelsund’s book What We See When We Read (short answer: we make most of it up).

Canal life, however, is just window dressing here. The story follows what I guess, having read a few of these now, is the usual script. There is the juxtaposition of high life and low, with the yacht Southern Cross and the barge Providence representing different ends of the social-economic (but not moral) divide. There is the man, and in this case a woman too, leading a kind of double life, which requires Maigret to dig into their past. And finally the killer is revealed as someone we have sympathy for, their crime the last stop in a life lived downhill, full of disappointment and despair.

A good read, but the plot is based on a pile of improbabilities and coincidences. This is also par for the course. Maigret himself never seems to do much actual detective work aside from tracking a few leads to nail things down at the end. Instead, a wall cracks and the killers sort of crumble on their own.

Maigret index

When the historian Henry Adams met President Grant the shock upset years of his “education,” a term he used to cover his entire intellectual heritage as an American:

Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as common-place as Grant’s own common-places to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

I always think of this scene whenever I hear anyone speak of meritocracy in America. In the country where Donald Trump became president? Grant had at least been a successful general. Trump couldn’t even run a casino. Doesn’t Trump’s election make the notion of rising through one’s merits, however broadly defined, ludicrous? Does it not seem like a defiance of first principles?

Things I was thinking of recently while reading Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes. If not evolution, in the strict Darwinian sense, I think we’ve at least put paid to the notion of there being much progress in human affairs.

Three books in and I’m starting to detect a pattern. At its center we have men, haunted by demons and drink, who have come to the end of the line. Simenon is the poet-psychologist of disappointment and downward mobility. This one starts off with another such down-at-the-heels fellow, a “desperate soul,” checking in at a cheap hotel and then, “both enraged and overcome by his fate,” blowing his brains out.

An opening act like that wouldn’t seem to introduce much of a mystery, but Maigret feels personally responsible (which he certainly is!) and so decides to investigate further. This gets him into a really improbable back story, apparently having some relation to Simenon’s own youth in Liège and which plays a bit like a Belgian Crime and Punishment. And again one has the sense that the real original sin was a class mixture that didn’t take. Rich and poor are like two different species. When the suicide’s wife comes to see Maigret he notices a resemblance right away: “Not a facial resemblance, no, but a similarity of expression, of social class, so to speak.”

I don’t know where Maigret himself fits in on the class ladder. His father was a bailiff or estate manager. Being a top investigator seems like a pretty big deal, but in 1930s France? Most of his authority comes from the way he physically dominates a room, which is often attributed to his “proletarian” frame or “peasant” stock. I don’t think this is meant to be flattering. He is described here as appearing “bovine” a couple of times, and as seeming like an elephant. In many ways he is a sort of anti-type to the eccentric fictional detective, who is often something of a dandy. Maigret doesn’t speak much, has a face not fully molded out of clay, and either affects or genuinely feels bored a lot of the time (in The Flemish House he’ll let it drop that “when in the presence of a possible culprit, I make a point of acting like an imbecile”). Instead of the thrill of the hunt he has only a weary sense of duty. And yet dramatically it seems to work.

Maigret index

Antonia Fraser, in the golden age of author photos.

Sometimes when you’re reading you come across a line in a book that makes you lift your eyes from the page and go “Hm.”

This happened to me recently while reading Antonia Fraser’s biography Mary Queen of Scots. One chapter in this classic work is given over to an account of the murder of Mary’s husband Lord Darnley. It’s one of the more celebrated, and complicated, murder plots of all time, but Fraser goes a step further in calling it “the most debatable, as well as surely the most worked over murder in history.”

By “worked over” she means worked over by historians. And to be sure, there’s been a lot of study and analysis of the event surrounding Darnley’s death. But “surely the most worked over murder in history”? I will give Fraser a mulligan for the Kennedy assassination, as her book came out in 1969 and Kennedy might not have been “history” yet, and while there’d been the Warren Commission things hadn’t gone totally crazy. But for other murders having as good or better claims I would submit the assassination of Julius Caesar and the murder of Rasputin. I think historians have probably worked over both those events more than the killing of Lord Darnley, though in the case of Darnley there may be more mystery still attached. Moving away from politics I might add the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. That probably still ranks as “the crime of the (twentieth) century” though it’s not as well remembered now.

Food for a moment’s thought anyway.

Maigret is still a big guy. A “good 100 kilos.” The kind of weight that really makes him feel the heat. But he can also turn his size on for effect, swelling to fill a room (“He was enormous . . .”) when he needs to intimidate a witness. He does this a lot.

A “dull, grey atmosphere” of middle-class mediocrity surrounds the case. At the end of the novel Maigret will present himself in such a way that “If you had seen his face, you would probably have described the dominant impression as boredom.” But he may be acting a bit at that point.

This is a novel of appearances, among people who think that appearances are all there are. The beastly bourgeoisie: Maigret finds them both respectable and repulsive (an attitude readers will get used to). “Funny sort of people,” he concludes. He looks on the young woman preparing to marry the murdered man’s son “with feelings verging on admiration. But a particular kind of admiration, with more than a touch of revulsion in it.” She’s entering marriage like it’s some kind of business enterprise! Meanwhile, “he was both attracted and repelled by the complex physiognomy of his murder victim.” He’s better off dead, I think we’re meant to feel, and finally done with being part of such a miserable family, where even the presence of happiness and love has to be guessed at. Certainly Maigret is relieved not to have anything more to do with them.

Another story of a double life. The respectable man and the criminal. Inside every human being there’s a crook and a wrong-doer. I was reminded of a true crime book I read years ago called The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère. Perhaps the guy in that book was reading a lot of Simenon and took it too much to heart. Or perhaps this is a French thing.

Maigret index

Maigret is introduced as a big guy, though evidence varies in the series as to how tall he is. He’s more broad like a bull. He dominates a room. When he walks down a narrow corridor his shoulders brush either wall.

Tough guy too. He can take a bullet and keep on the case. And when his partner is killed he can’t cry. Literally, he’s “unable to shed tears.”

But he’s sensitive as well. Or at least he’s good at reading people, which is a kind of sensitivity. The book begins with a simple exercise in decoding. Ironically, the anthropometric information he receives will be of no use at all given the nature of the mystery to be solved.

Maigret has a simple theory for solving crime that he refers to as the crack in the wall. “Inside every crook and wrong-doer there lives a human being.” Eventually that human being will reveal itself. I suppose by extension this might mean that inside every human being there’s another human being as well, so that all any of us ever reveal to the world is a façade.

In this case Maigret gets lucky and the crack comes from the wrong-doer’s fondness for alcohol. Not much work involved there.

The plot carries some message about the duality of man, though not so much good and evil as high and low. This is the real conflict in society, more so even than that between villains and do-gooders.

Maigret index