Erzählung Nr.5. "Maigrets Pfeife" (1945)
Maigret auf der Bank (1953). Nr 41
Maigret, Lognon und die Gangster (1951). Nr.39

Superb detective fiction.

Murders usually do not happen on a Monday. And yet, on this Monday, October 19, a man is found dead in an alley. It looks almost like a regular mugging gone wrong and yet when Maigret and his team start investigating, they realize that things do not add up - the dead man's wife claims that the shoes he is wearing don't belong to her husband and the job he supposedly worked at had not existed for the last few years. So in order to find out who killed him, Maigret first need to find out what happened to that man in the years before he died - because it looks like the man lived a double life - one in the suburbs during the nights and weekends with the wife and one somewhere else during the working days.

The mystery of why the man had the double life is a lot more interesting than the murder itself. As with a lot of these novels, it is as much a novel of murder and crime as it is of France at the time of writing - maybe some characters are exaggerated but the background feels real. As for the murderer - I'd usually consider the way they were introduced a cheat by a crime novelist but here it works - we may meet them for the first time when they are revealed as the killer but there are enough hints before that to know that this person exists and is a possibility.

Overall an enjoyable entry in the series. And Maigret's sparring with the examining magistrate Judge Coméliau is as amusing as usual (although this is one part of the novel that probably reads better if you read the novels in order - there is a lot of back history there). ( )

Quality Maigret as always. It is remarkable how good his books are despite having churned so many of them out. I can't think of someone who was a better combination of production and quality. ( )

I really wish this book hadn't ended badly.

I was charmed as I read, intrigued by the mystery, diverted by all the odd people Maigret meets and interviews over the course of his investigation. It opens with a murder, and much of the book is about piecing together the victim's double life: by evening, Louis was a henpecked shopkeeper, by day aimless, free-spirited, and happy.

The mystery of Louis' murder is tied closely to the mystery of what, exactly, he did with his seemingly empty days. We find out at the start that the factory where Louis claimed to work had shut down three years earlier, that Louis hadn't found a new job, yet the paychecks he brought home to his family never halted; in fact, his income had increased.

Maigret, the Chief Inspector, is one of the Great Detectives - listed alongside the likes of Sherlock and Poirot - so I was eager to get to know him. I can't imagine a more likable detective than Maigret. He spends most of the book wandering in and out of various bars and restaurants. He hops in for a bit to eat, or a quick aperitif, before and after every interview. He brings some of his informants little presents when he stops by, he's careful about dripping rain on a freshly waxed floor, he calls his wife when he's going to be working late.

And while Maigret gets to the bottom of things, he's not a monomaniac. He gets bored of his case and decides to work on something else for a while - more than once. He rolls his eyes and sighs internally when overeager underlings try to pull heroic stunts. He delegates.

The problem is that for all the interesting, well-chosen details, for all the sympathy Simenon made me feel for Louis, this is a detective novel where the author did not play fair with the clues.

When Maigret named 'whodunit', the audience did not have enough information to make a correct deduction. The killer, in fact, is never introduced as a character - we never hear his name even once until the moment when he is revealed as the killer. He isn't mentioned or referred to; he doesn't exist at all, until the very end, when all of a sudden he's our guy. And he never appears in a scene. Simenon loses a lot of points from me for that; one of the pleasures of reading Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard was feeling like I was in competent hands, along for the ride with Maigret, gathering clues. The ending was a total let down; it felt like a betrayal.

The book was such a straight mystery that I can't really forgive Simenon for cheating. So while I enjoyed the book, while I'd happily read another, even, I'm knocking it down to three for failing as a mystery. (Also for being $10, because that's crazy).

As a final note: I really, really wished I had read this in the original French - and, in fact, I don't think I would read another Maigret in English. The translation is fine, but the language is clean and on the spare side. Every detail is interesting and well chosen - from a writer's standpoint, that might be the most interesting thing about this novel. In any case, it's simple enough to be a fun, easy read in French; the perfect thing to keep a foot in, as it were. (And that just leaves me with the task of figuring out how to get French language ebooks onto my Kindle? Simenon doesn't seem to have reached the Public Domain yet - he's not on Project Gutenberg, anyhow). ( )