Maigret's Dead Man

An unknown man telephones Maigret from a succession of Paris bars, saying that he has some vital information for the Commissaire, but he is being followed and his life is in danger. A little later a body matching the description of this man turns up in the Place de Concorde, suggesting that he was at least right about the second part… Maigret has the difficult task of finding out who he was and why he was killed, and he takes it as a personal challenge.

As a mystery story this doesn’t work particularly well, because the solution turns on a piece of information that Maigret has but the reader is only given after he has made the connection. But otherwise it has a lot of good stuff in it — there are a couple of breathless chases show more across Paris, punctuated by taxi rides and phone calls from bars, some key interventions by Mme Maigret, some agreeable sparring between Maigret and a judge, a fun sequence where Maigret and one of his inspectors get to play at running a café, a big police raid on a dodgy neighbourhood, and even an interlude at a rural inn on the Seine. Pretty much everything you look for in a Maigret.

As usual from the novels of this period, there is also an intriguing connection to Maigret’s past, although this time it turns out to be somewhat tenuous and not critical to the plot. show less

Particularly good Maigret. Written in 1948, it covers our area of Marais and environs before they were chic. Palpable evocation of petits cafes et petits gens.

Some mysterious telephone calls to Chief Inspector Maigret piques his interest enough that he gets involved to try to foil a murder in Maigret’s Dead Man, the 29th novel in the series. Alas, the man nonetheless ends up dead. Who was he?

I will not ruin the fun of this novel by telling you any more than that; suffice it to say that Maigret will not only learn the victim’s name and his killer, but he will manage to solve an even larger crime. Readers will love Maigret’s skill and relentlessness in solving several crimes and resolving a messy family situation.

While the novel was released in 1947, Maigret’s Dead Man will enthrall readers today as much as it did 70 years ago. How grateful I am that Penguin Classics is reissuing the show more entire of George Simenon’s oeuvre! show less

If you want mystery stories that hang together, you don't read Maigret. These are for the people, the atmosphere, the calvados, and the pipe smoke.

Gruesome, sadistic crimes. Liked the book otherwise, but hard to overlook the cruelty.

A good one, but took me a while, got a little slow for me.

Pleasant enough.