Is Maigret an alcoholic? He does wonder at one point here if he’s drinking too much, though at least he’s not an angry drunk. He just gets sleepy.

So not an alcoholic, but someone who drinks a lot. Most of this is professionally related. “The upstanding citizens who protest against the number of bars are unaware that they are a godsend for the police.” A poisoned chalice, I’d call it, since given the number of glasses of beer, wine, liquors, and liqueurs that Maigret pounds back in these books, usually while he’s working, his liver must be thoroughly pickled.

His favourite beverage is something called a Calvados. I had to look this up, and found that it’s a cider brandy native to Normandy. It’s also the regimental drink of the military unit I was a member of in the reserves. This was news to me. Apparently the Canadians landing on the beaches on D-Day were handed out Calvados by the locals.

As Maigret heads to Normandy for this adventure it’s no surprise he gets a chance to knock back a few Calvados. Though he also smashes a bottle for effect at the end, an action he almost immediately regrets.

The set-up is familiar. There’s been a murder in a small town that looks like a picture postcard. Maigret admits he has “a childish hankering” for such places, even while being aware of “the other side of the coin.” The pretty houses are just like the nice clothes and good manners of the rich family he’s investigating, where all the members are living secret lives. Meanwhile, poor people end up being more collateral damage.

Overall I’d rate this as one of the best pure mysteries thus far. It’s a poisoning this time, and poisonings are fun because they’re a more thoughtful sort of crime. The killer has a plan that has to be unraveled, as it is here in a satisfying way. Minus what happens to that bottle of Calvados.

Maigret index

After playing host to various visiting officials keen to study his (non-existent) “methods,” Maigret is on the road here, taking a “study tour” through the U.S. that has landed him in Tucson, Arizona and a coroner’s inquest into the death of a B-girl whose mangled body parts have been found on a railway track. Although only a spectator he is immediately “hooked” and “in the game.”

Maigret had come to America on at least one previous occasion, but in Maigret in New York the New World was looking a lot like the Old, in part because the people he was investigating were European immigrants and in part because New York City is such a cosmopolitan place. In Tucson Maigret encounters the real America and there’s more of a sense of culture shock, and not just because in the vastness of the sun-baked American West he is someone who has never learned to drive a car. Though being a pedestrian is linked to his sense of feeling shabby.

He felt it several times a day, this impression of shabbiness. These people had everything. In no matter what small town, the cars were as numerous and luxurious as on the Champs-Élysées. Everyone wore new clothes, new shoes; shoe repair shops were hard to find. Crowds all looked well scrubbed and prosperous.

The houses were new, too, full of the latest appliances. They had everything: that was the right word.

And yet despite all this newness, prosperity, and plenty, the newspapers are full of crime. Why? To some extent it can be explained by crime being part of the same drive for more that consumes everyone. It’s this drive that leads to the rise of the criminal celebrity, an admiration “of the kind that everyone in the States showed for anyone who succeeds, whether as a millionaire, a cinema star or a famous murderer.” That drive, the desire for more, can never be satisfied. As his FBI guide explains, “there are moments when the comfortable house, the smiling wife, the well-scrubbed children, the car, the club, the office and bank account are not enough.” “Does that happen back in your country, too?” he asks. Maigret affirms that it “happens to everybody.” This is because, he believes, “that men and their passions are the same everywhere.” So much so that in the end Maigret’s Tucson counterpart feels the same sense of indifference to the execution of justice.

All of this stuff is interesting, in the great tradition of French intellectual takes on American culture. But the actual crime and its investigation are difficult to follow, even with the maps and diagrams provided, and the attitude toward rape has also dated badly. Still, I’d rate it above average for the series, even if it’s a bit of an outlier in ways that go beyond the desert setting.

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From “The Curriculum and College Life: Confronting Unfulfilled Promises” by Leon Botstein in Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (2005):

The underlying and optimistic belief behind the effort to make access to higher education as universal as possible is a traditional conviction that there must be a causal link between education and human progress. The notion of progress can be understood in various ways, in terms of civility, understanding, tolerance, ethics, aesthetic judgment, or citizen participation. One of the sharp ironies of contemporary life is that although more Americans are completing more years of formal schooling than ever before, including time in college, we find ourselves confronted, it seems, despite more exposure to learning, with an absence of progress in these arenas. One needs only to cite the declining quality of public political debate, lapses in integrity and standards in professional and business practices, public entertainment (e.g., reality television), precollege school achievement, and what the eighteenth century called civic virtue.

…

Curricular changes notwithstanding, what has remained frighteningly consistent despite nearly a half century of increased access to college is that the encounter with the primary purpose of being in college – learning – seems not to have left many traces on our life after college. The presumed civic and cultural benefits of going to college continue to elude us. The experience of classroom learning (writing papers, tackling problem sets, completing laboratory assignments, taking examinations) has not influenced college graduates, as adults, to live their lives differently or, one might suggest, better. Classroom learning seems to have had little effect on the manner in which students conduct their daily lives or graduates pursue vocations and careers, if one believes the critics of contemporary  practice of medicine and law. There is little empirical justification for the conceit of influence embedded in the rhetoric of liberal learning and general education.

The detective’s sidekick is almost as essential a part of mystery fiction as the detective himself. It’s testimony to just how indispensable a figure the sidekick is that even though Maigret doesn’t have a regular Watson or Hastings or Archie Goodwin — though he does have Lucas and Janvier, subordinates at the Police Judiciare — in many books a temporary sidekick has to be introduced. Like the sad drunken clown he employs in Maigret in New York, or the poor musician who volunteers to be his assistant in Maigret’s First Case.

In this book the sidekick is a Brit from Scotland Yard named Mr. Pyke, a fellow lawman who has come, like so many others, to observe the famous Maigret’s “method.” Only to find out, as those others had before, that Maigret doesn’t have any method. Or at least that’s what Maigret always says. Though I think it’s obvious that his anti-method is a kind of method all its own.

I thought this was one of the best in the series so far. Maigret comes to the island of Porquerolles to investigate the murder of a beachcomber who had, just before his death, publicly announced himself as a friend of the Chief Inspector. A nice little cast of suspects is assembled, leading Maigret to observe at one point that “there were only freaks on the island.” This gives the proceedings a tidier feel, with Porquerolles being a sort of locked room. The action is easy to follow with lots of wry human observations. The only thing I didn’t care for was the ending. The killer is someone who really upsets Maigret, leading him to verbally and physically abuse him in a manner I found quite out of keeping with his usual reserve and empathy. And yet they don’t seem any worse than many of the other criminals we’ve met in these novels. Nor does it seem to be the case that Maigret took the murder of his “friend” personally. So what is it about the killer that rubs him so much the wrong way? As with the horrible Madame Le Cloagulen in Signed, Picpus, I get the feeling that it has something to do with gender assumptions.

Maigret index