yes, absolutely there will be as many spoilers as possible.
A man is killed in a narrow alley. He turns out to have a horrible wife in the suburbs who thinks he still has the job he lost (when the business shut down) many months (years?) before. Somehow he gets money and brings it home at night. Maigret visits people he used to work with and gets several reports of him sitting on a bench in the middle of the day. There is cold weather and there is a lot of policework tracking people down. A man is found who committed robberies in cahoots with the dead man. The dead man has a daughter who is horrible too, and has a boyfriend younger than her who has disappeared.

Meanwhile, the dead man had rented a room in an unregistered rooming house run by an ex-madam. This criminal presence is at the edge of our senses but it turns out that is where the murderer came from. They just stole his money and killed him before he could find out.

The daughter's boyfriend shows up, the daughter is horrible, the wife is horrible, and the nice man who just happened to do a little robbing, is dead.

Along with the theme of keeping the job loss secret from the yucky wife, there is also the theme of him being controlled by the yucky wife & breaking out; the guy buys some light brown (dung colored) shoes and one of the reasons he needs a room in town is to have a place to leave his new possessions.The wife would never let him wear such shoes, or a tie with color. He takes up with another woman who resembles the wife. But then he is murdered.

A fairly undemanding, but enjoyable Maigret — the Commisaire's investigation this time centres on a series of leisurely interviews aimed at unravelling the life of the apparently unremarkable Louis Thuret, a man who goes to work every morning and returns to his wife in the suburbs on the same train every night, but has nonetheless somehow managed to get himself stabbed to death in an alleyway in the middle of the afternoon. As always with Simenon, there's a lot of attention to the detail of everyday life: the big questions have less to do with "who did it?" than with when and where to have lunch, whether or not to wear galoshes, whether or not to sit down and risk getting rainwater on the witness's furniture, etc. And of course we are once again made to reflect on the line, much finer than we like to think, dividing crime from respectable lower-middle-class life. ( )

The weather in Paris in late autumn, as Inspector Maigret probes the murder of Louis Thouret, is dull, damp and stolid--much like the characters in _Maigret and the Man on the Bench_ and, indeed, much like the novel itself. Maigret's investigation takes him into contact with personalities so weighted down by their numbing lives that his frequent visits into little cafes and bars for a drink or two while he does his detecting (couldn't do that on _Law and Order_!) seems as much an escape from their dreariness as from the sodden weather. Unfortunately, I sometimes felt I had to put the book down and take a break as well. The investigation itself is quite plodding and without much drama--much like real-life police work, I imagine, but in this case, "real-life" equals "boring." The writing reflects this, too--carefully crafted, very spare, no useless diversions, and while it can be quite effective (Maigret himself is a maximum personality via a minimum words) and sometimes even lovely, it offers no relief from the drudgery of the story, merely enhancing it.

_Maigret and the Man on the Bench_ would be an unfortunate introduction to Simenon's Inspector (as it was, in a way, for me, having read some Maigrets many years ago, but remembering almost nothing about them), since generally he's far more interesting a read. When you consider just how many Maigret stories there are, it isn't suprising that they aren't all gems (how many of Agatha Christie's mysteries are less-than-memorable variations on a theme?), but this one is wearisome. Three stars. ( )