Backyard tent.

Empire by Jeremy Paxman is a sweeping historical and cultural survey of the history of British imperialism that was published as a companion to a BBC series of the same name (hosted by Paxman). When reading it I came across the following passage about the discovery of the source of the Nile by the Victorian explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke that had some personal resonance for me:

Does any of this matter now, other than as a ripping yarn? The waterfalls which tumbled out of Lake Victoria, through which Speke intended to offer the Marquess of Ripon immortality by naming them Ripon Falls, largely disappeared when a dam was built in the 1950s. If the name of Speke is known at all, it is more likely to be as a deprived area of Liverpool, once home to the Bryant and May match factory  and the Triumph sports-car plant, both long-gone British brands. Richard Burton has his splendid tomb in a Mortlake cemetery in the shape of an Arab tent, but mention the name and you are likely to have to explain that you’re not talking about the Welsh actor twice married to the actress Elizabeth Taylor.

This made me sit up for a couple of reasons. First of all, as a schoolboy forty years or more ago now I remember writing a report on Burton and Speke and their discovery of the source of the Nile. It’s a story I’ve never forgotten, and since then I have always known about Burton and Speke. Now I’ll admit I may be an outlier, but what Paxman says is an interesting reflection on the sort of thing that falls out of public awareness and “doesn’t matter now.” And it makes sense. I mean, is there any way to quantify what parts of history matter now?

I guess knowing who these two guys were isn’t going to impact the life of anyone today, so I agree with Paxman’s wry take on matters. But isn’t he being a bit provincial, or at least limited to his own experience, in thinking that anyone outside of England would know that Speke is a neighbourhood in Liverpool? I’ve never heard of the place, or of Bryant and May matches. Even Triumph sports cars are only a name that rings a distant bell. I can’t remember ever actually seeing one, or knowing where they were made. The way we understand history is such a personal thing.

Simenon was a machine cranking out these Maigret titles, and I have to think that all the time the chief inspector spends thinking about his retirement – two years away in this book, as he’s fifty-three – reflects an authorial burn-out as well. But then Maigret was ready to retire as early as Lock No. 1, which was still early going in the series, so there’s that.

Another incompatible couple. An older man who is a bit of a loser marries a younger woman who is “petite and very curvaceous, with a come-hither look in her eye, a suggestive pout and seductive manner.” In short, she’s trouble. In these mysteries the women either love too much or not at all, and bubble-headed Ginette falls into the latter category.

This is a weaker effort, as the crime is brutal and uninteresting, the characters dull and undistinguished, and the solution just a matter of following people around.

Maigret index

My hat goes off to Georges Simenon. Following Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses, a book I thought had him just going through the motions, he came up with something quite fresh and surprising in Maigret’s Secret.

At a dinner party with the Pardons, Maigret gets to reminiscing about a case that has always bothered him. A woman was stabbed to death in her home and her husband was convicted of her murder. He ended up being executed. But was he guilty?

Maigret had his doubts at the time of the investigation, but things were taken out of his hands by his old nemesis, the magistrate Coméliau, and Adrien Josset is sent off to what I assume was a date with Madame Guillotine (the official method of execution in France until the abolishment of the death penalty in 1981). Years later, Maigret’s doubts persist. Actually, Maigret’s Doubts would have been a better title here, but it had already been used. I don’t know what his “secret” is.

So this is a mystery without a solution. Or, for that matter, any way of arriving at a solution. Maigret’s method (or anti-method) of staying open-minded and allowing the case to resolve itself, takes time. But here time is the one thing he doesn’t have, as the public is impatient for Josset’s head. All we have are hints that things might have turned out differently. At one point Maigret meets a concierge who is just one of several extremely rude and antagonistic supporting players. She “looked nothing like the person he had imagined.” This is a point worth flagging, as it’s part of a theme in the book about the reliability of snap judgments. When the concierge lets him in and he goes to the apartment of Josset’s lover he is again put off.

It was all a bit of a let-down. The geraniums were there all right, but they were the only detail that corresponded to the mental image Maigret had formed of the place.

Just as with the concierge, Maigret’s mental picture is blown up. So how much else might he have been wrong, or right, about?

Once again there is something made of the fact that the married couple no longer sleep together — a point that had some weight in Maigret Sets a Trap and Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses. Is it a bad sign here too? Or immaterial? We’ll never know.

A coda suggests a possible alternative solution, but it comes by way of an unreliable narrator and is unverifiable anyway. This is deeply subversive. Closure, however ironic, is one of the essential elements of the mystery genre. But here we’re left to entertain different Jossets, a man who is either very wicked and clever or very hapless and naïve. Some lives, like that of Josset or the parallel case of Pardon’s patient, just come to a frustrating and messy end. They have their own narrative logic, and we have to take them or leave them as they are.

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Reading an account of the adventures of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, popularly known as El Cid, I came across a delightful bit of history.

In the eleventh century the Iberian peninsula was a crazy free-for-all and among the players were the counts of Barcelona. At one point there were two counts who were joint rulers and also twins: Ramon Berenguer and Berenguer Ramon. These brothers were the son of Ramon Berenguer I (“the Old”). Anyway, Ramon Berenguer II (known as “the Towhead”) died in a hunting accident (oddly enough, William II of England died around the same time in similarly mysterious circumstances). Brother Berenguer Ramon II (known as “the Fratricide”) then took over. His nickname tells you something about the suspicions there were at the time over his involvement in his brother’s death.

That all this was going on between twins with reversed names just seemed like too much fun for me. As things worked out, the Fratricide Berenguer Ramon was later succeeded by his brother the Towhead’s son, who became Ramon Berenguer III (and who was also Ramon Berenguer I, Count of Provence). With these unimaginative names you can tell why they needed additional descriptive monikers. Ramon Berenguer III is known as the Great on account of his success in battle. On his death he left his Catalan possessions to his eldest son Ramon Berenguer IV and Provence to his younger son, Berenguer Ramon.

Another formerly rich family fallen on hard times, residing in a grand old house that is falling apart. I get the sense that Simenon didn’t care much for old money.

The decrepit house is a fit setting though, as Maigret himself is close to retirement and feeling out of step with modern life. The drink that will see him through the investigation is a hot toddy. He begins his day by thinking that Paris in the rain resembles a black-and-white silent film, and then the crime scene strikes him as being like one of the engravings that used to appear in the Sunday newspapers before photography.

The inhabitants of the house are just as archaic. There’s a housekeeper who has been serving the family for fifty years. There’s a pair of elderly parents who have entered a non-communicative twilight phase. And there is the next generation, one of whom has just been found dead. His brother and sister-in-law are the other reluctant witnesses, their characters infected by the moribund spirit of the place.

Everything was decrepit, the house’s contents as well as its occupants. The family and the house had turned in on themselves, taking on a hostile appearance.

Putting this musty air of decline into further relief is an examining magistrate just out of college. He’s one of a “new school” of magistrate and Maigret finds him “insolently youthful” but that just seems to come from the deputy chief inspector being out of sorts. I didn’t read him as being anything but respectful.

In any event, Maigret is in a sour mood and the murder itself turns out to be something a little less than it appears. This may be the first time in the series I had the sense that Maigret was only going through the motions, not utilizing any method (he has none!) but simply withdrawing into himself, physically and mentally, until some thought comes to him or some observation becomes significant and unlocks the case. This “formed part of a technique he had unconsciously built up over the years.” It works again here, but he isn’t feeling it and I wasn’t either.

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