Another great Maigret. About the poor murdered man Couchet.... a wanderer who drifts from job to job but knows he will one day strike it rich. In the meantime though the awful wife can't wait and trades him in for a boring civil servant with a pension. Couchet is another in the long line of earthy, mistress laden men that Simenon obviously admires- big heart, big appetite, etc. - so the book kind of plays as a warm portrait of this guy. And of the awful wife and spineless civil servant. In their apartment, Maigret reflects: ""It was sad. So sad that it almost made you want to give up on being a man, on living on this earth, even the sun shines over it for several hours a day there are real birds flying freely." Yep, that's Simenon. ( )

Maigret Mystified
Review of the Penguin Classics paperback (2014) a new translation* by Ros Schwartz of the French language original "L'ombre chinoise"** (1932)

The Shadow Puppet was more of a depressing tale in my otherwise enthusiastic survey of the early Maigret romans populaires and the non-Maigret romans durs of Georges Simenon. A successful marketer of popular medicine cures is murdered in his office and his safe is emptied of 360,000 Francs. Maigret suspects that the two crimes are actually separate events and his suspicions fall on the residents of the apartment complex where the office & lab were located. The motive turns out to be one of vicious greed which results in actual insanity.

The one lighter aspect was due to Maigret's sympathies for the murdered man's mistress and his attempts to help her out of her financial problems.

See cover at http://www.trussel.com/maig/covers/pen_mys2.jpg
The cover of the first Penguin English language edition of "The Shadow Puppet" translated by Jean Stewart and published as "Maigret Mystified" in 1964. Image sourced from Maigret of the Month.

I've now read more than a dozen of the early Maigret novellas in the past four weeks and they continue to impress with how different they are not only from each other, but also from other "Golden Age of Crime" novels of that interwar era. What is even more impressive is that the first dozen were all published in 1931 as if he wrote one every month. Perhaps it is not that surprising from an author who wrote over 500 books in his lifetime, but it still an eyeopener.

In the continuing confusion for completists, this is Maigret #12 in the recent Penguin Classics series of new translations (2013-2019) of the Inspector Maigret novels and short stories, but it is Maigret #13 in the previous standard Maigret listing on Library Thing.

Trivia and Links
* Some earlier English translations have given the title as Maigret Mystified or as The Shadow in the Courtyard.
** Shadow puppets were first known as Ombre Chinoise (Chinese Shadows) in France, as they were first introduced from China to France by French missionaries in 1767 (Source: Wikipedia).

A curiosity (I don't know if it is a case of any rare printings) is that this new translation appears to have been issued with two different cover images by Penguin Classics..

The Shadow Puppet has been adapted in 5 different television versions, in English (once), Italian (twice) and French (twice). Information and links about the various adaptations are available at French Wikipedia.

There is an article about the Penguin Classics re-translations of the Inspector Maigret novels at Maigret, the Enduring Appeal of the Parisian Sleuth by Paddy Kehoe, RTE, August 17, 2019. ( )

Maigret finds himself liking a murdered man that he never met while he looks for his murderer among 28 residents of what an American would call an apartment complex. This Simenon novel has especially strong character portraits of sad and nasty people. ( )

My favorite of the Maigret books so far. Complete with all of the Maigret constants: people in situations that they themselves have made hopeless, millennial types, wastrels, a good murder or two. I wish I could read french, but these new translations have a very constant feel throughout them, despite there being a number of different translators. ( )

This is another one from the first few batches of Maigret stories, a relatively unspectacular case in which a businessman is found murdered in his office, his body blocking the door of an empty safe. The crime is reported by a concièrge who notices that the shadow the murdered man projects on his blinds hasn't moved in a few hours - hence the French title. The English title is so generic and irrelevant that it suggests the publishers couldn't find anything really distictive in the book (although some recent English editions have a title that's a translation of the French one), but it's not without interest if you read it carefully: it's a very nice early example of the way Simenon gets Maigret to dig into the social and psychological background to a crime and work out how "respectable" people can be pushed over the edge into criminal acts. Maigret's own emotional engagement with the case comes over very well, too. And there's an entertaining minor character in the shape of the dead man's mistress, the young dancer Mine. Not a top-flight Maigret, but worth a couple of hours of your time. ( )