3.5* ( )

Super! Maigret has retired and has moved out to the country, but before long his nephew (a young cop) knocks on the door and shares his terrible news- he's been set up to take the fall for a murder! Of course, Maigret must come to town to fix it, all the while butting heads with his successor at the Quays and also with the the criminal element that he must tangle with, but without the backup of a badge or real authority. Instead of staring / talking down the perp in his office he must go the guys home (who is holding all the cards) and maneuver him into confessing (he has set it up so the police can overhear) and it's a swashbuckling conclusion- Maigret even fires his gun (though not to kill, thankfully). Great. ( )

Maigret helps out by keeping his eyes and ears open, and by wise use of his long experience of the Parisian underworld. He spends most of the novel at a table in the corner of a cafe. Every so often he makes a judiciously placed telephone call. He befriends a helpful whore. After a little light torture, all is well.

This was my first Maigret, and one is clearly in the hands of a master - one who's testing playing games: can he hold an audience while almost literally nothing happens? Well, yes - just. Which I suppose is impressive, but not as impressive as a really good novel would have been.

I'll definitely have another go, but I'm sorry I started here. ( )

These radio plays give you exactly what you expect: the phlegmatic police inspector and the flavour of fifties France. Comfort listening. March 2020 ( )

Maigret is not going to make a convert of me: it was mildly entertaining but it conforms to the detective fiction pattern I’d expected it to. Which is why now, barely eight hours after I finished reading it, the details are fading, and there isn’t an idea or theme that’s memorable either:
"The traditional elements of the detective story are: (1) the seemingly perfect crime; (2) the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points; (3) the bungling of dim-witted police; (4) the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective; and (5) the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained. Detective stories frequently operate on the principle that superficially convincing evidence is ultimately irrelevant. Usually it is also axiomatic that the clues from which a logical solution to the problem can be reached be fairly presented to the reader at exactly the same time that the sleuth receives them and that the sleuth deduce the solution to the puzzle from a logical interpretation of these clues". (Britannica.com)
In this novel there is a slight variation in that the wrongly accused suspect is also one of the dim-witted police. But on p56 we learn that this was a standard gangland killing, and the challenge was to get #Insert gangster’s name finally to admit that this was the truth. On p73 we learn that Maigret had no need to look over his shoulder. He knew what was going on.
And so does the reader. The only interest for the reader is to discover how Maigret will get the admission that he needs when he’s no longer in the police force (because he’s retired).
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/21/maigret-maigret-19-by-georges-simenon-transl... ( )