At the end of an unusually quiet day at the Quai d'Orsay, Maigret discovers that his favourite pipe has gone missing. Not the sort of thing a Great Detective likes to publicise, naturally! It takes him a little while to reconstruct the events of the day, but after a sleepless night he's pretty sure what must have happened, and this gives him the motivation to look more closely into the case of the widow and her son who came to him with a rambling and unlikely tale of strangers getting into their house when they were out. Which is just as well, because - surprise, surprise! - there is something serious behind that story after all.

A very average sort of Maigret story - nothing really special apart from Maigret's mild embarrassment about the missing pipe. The widow and her feckless son are a brilliantly condensed rendering of the essence of Simenon's "hanging on to respectability by the skin of their teeth" characters, but that is something he has done so well so many times that we don't really even notice it.

Something that always amuses me in the earlier Maigret books (and obviously still applied when he wrote this one in 1945) is the way the police hardly ever have cars of their own available, but go everywhere by bus or cab. This one concludes with two policemen, two witnesses, and the arrestee all having to squeeze into one taxi for the trip back to the city! (Earlier in the story, Maigret had noted with resigned annoyance that the investigation had taken him over the boundary and he wouldn't be able to get his fare reimbursed any more...)

[This is for the version which only includes the novella, without "Maigret se fâche"] ( )