Addition of an American sounding board.

I dislike nothing about the Simenon Maigret stories or the forever magnificent Armstrong narration. Simply put, this is another classic French detective novel from one of the greatest ever writers in any language. When Maigret seems stuck in his thought process with regards to the crimes, Simenon introduces a temporary Hastings/Watson for the great detective to bounce his internal narrative off of, from which he puts all of the jigsaw pieces together to produce a wonderful conclusion to a thrilling story.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Another excellent Simenon story of Maigret.

A tangle of two murders in the same apartment, by different hands, with large sums of money hidden there. Maigret has several suspects to work his way through, and towards the end a foreign observer making him self-conscious about his methods. He takes the latter opportunity to discuss some of his methods, which is enlightening, even if it’s not entirely new to we regular fans of the great French detective.
The problem with reviewing the Maigret stories is that they are all very good so it becomes tricky trying to find something new to say. Their relative brevity shows how well Simenon crafted his characters and the humanity with which he constructed his plots. Some will doubtless find them a bit boring, lacking any fast action or gunfights, but with the attention to detail in all aspects they don’t need those things. Conan-Doyle’s Holmes didn’t need such things either (almost all the uses of guns are in the US films), and without the need of a sidekick to write about his cases, Maigret doesn’t require his own Watson although Lucas (or Torrance, etc) often fills any other plot necessities.
If you enjoy the Maigret character and stories, then you’ll enjoy this one, for sure.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Maigret's lapse...

Cécile Pardon has become a regular visitor to Inspector Maigret at his office in the Police Judiciaire building in Paris. A spinster who lived with her elderly widowed aunt, Cécile had become convinced that someone was coming in to their apartment at night while they slept. Maigret had made a superficial gesture towards investigating, but everyone thought she was imagining things. And worse, everyone was teasing Maigret that she kept visiting because she had a crush on him. So on this morning, when Maigret saw her sitting patiently in the waiting room he left her there and got on with other things. When eventually he went to collect her, she was gone. Later, the body of her aunt is found in the apartment, strangled, and Cécile is nowhere to be found. The title gives a clue as to her fate.

Realising the aunt must already have been dead when Cécile came to see him, Maigret suspects that she knew who the murderer was and wanted to tell him directly rather than report it to the local police. He feels that if he had only taken the time to speak to her, Cécile may not have been killed. Maigret is too sensible and too experienced to blame himself for her death – he’s quite clear in his own mind that the murderer is fully responsible for that – but nevertheless his slight lapse makes him even more determined than usual to see that justice is done.

This one has quite a complicated plot for a Maigret novel, with several suspects and possible motives. Mostly it’s set in the apartment block in Bourg-la-Reine that Cécile and her aunt lived in – a block that the aunt also owned. For it turns out that she’s a rich old woman, but miserly, always convinced that her relatives are scrounging from her. She’s also unpleasant, treating poor Cécile like an unpaid servant, being unwilling to assist her nephew even though he’s out of a job and his wife is about to have a baby, and so on. She plays her many relatives off against each other, hinting to each that they will be the one to inherit when she dies. But these aren’t the only suspects – rumour has it that she keeps large sums of money in the apartment since she doesn’t trust banks, so anyone may have decided to break in, kill her and steal the money. However, the apartment has a concierge who controls entry to the building, so that if this was what happened, it must have been one of the other tenants, or the concierge herself.

Later in the book, Maigret finds himself being accompanied on his investigations by a visiting American criminologist, Spencer Oates, who has been given the opportunity to study the great man’s method. But Maigret, as he has said in other books, doesn’t have what he thinks of as “a method” – he simply speaks to the people involved, learns as much as he can about the victim, studies the location and the timings, thinks himself into the mind of the murderer, and uses his intelligence and experience to work out what must have happened. So he uses Oates as a kind of sounding board as he develops his theory, thus allowing the reader to follow his thinking too.

There’s a sub-plot about a man, one of the tenants, who has previously been jailed for his inappropriate behaviour with young girls. Some aspects of this might jar with modern readers, as girls are shown both as vulnerable and predatory. Although it’s an unpopular viewpoint now, I find this much more realistic than the idea that girls remain innocent angels until the day they are legally adult, so I felt this was an accurate if unflattering portrayal of adolescent girls, and also that Simenon gave a contrast in Maigret and the ex-prisoner of the response of the good man and the bad – one resisting temptation, the other preying on vulnerability.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Gareth Armstrong, and as always he did an excellent job of creating distinctive voices for Maigret and all the other characters.

Overall, I think this is one of the best of the Maigrets I’ve read so far. Simenon’s portrayal of the unglamorous side of Paris is as excellent as always, but this one is better plotted than some, and the themes and characterisation have more depth. And I always enjoy when the solution manages to surprise me but still feel credible. Quite a bleak story, but Maigret’s fundamental decency and integrity and his happy home life always stop these stories from becoming too depressingly noir. Highly recommended.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Starts well then descends into a ludicrous farce. Dreadful.

This is a Maigret which occurs every now and again and that is an awful one. The start was excellent but then the story becomes a tangled, incoherent mess. Avoid.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!