Seventeen short stories, collectively published in 1944, and spanning Maigret's career from his early cases as Chief Inspector of the Police Judiciaire through to post-retirement calls on his services, showing that if Simenon didn't have a preconceived plan for his protagonist's life arc, he did refer back to these earlier tales as he wrote his later novels.

I think I do prefer Maigret at novel length, but these were still good, and it was interesting to get a compressed view of Maigret's development from a somewhat brash inspector prepared to crush toes and loosen teeth during an interrogation, to a somewhat world-weary, but not cynical, revered elder-statesman, both enjoying and chaffing at retirement. ( )

Évidement, car il y a vingt nouvelles, quelques sont meilleures, quelques pires. À vrai dire, aucune n'est merveilleuse, et une ou deux sont même un peu agaçantes, mais dans l'ensemble, je m'amusais. ( )

This collection brings together most of (I daren't say "all" - Simenon bibliography is a complex field and different sources all seem to have different lists) the Maigret short stories originally published in magazines in the thirties. In terms of subject-matter, they cover more or less the whole gamut of the Maigret world - there's a canal story, a seamen's cafe story, a couple of Paris-Brussels train-journey stories, some Paris milieu stories, a peasant-village story, and some provincial bourgeois settings. Mme Maigret is in the background of two or three and the central character of one (the classic "L'Amoureux de Mme Maigret"); three or four of the stories are set during Maigret's first - subsequently-rescinded - retirement from the police force to a cottage on the Loire.

On the whole, I think the "short novel" format works better for Maigret than short stories, because the whole point of a Maigret is the slow accumulation of psychological and social data about the people concerned that leads Maigret to a solution of the mystery - in a short story, this background depth is necessarily sacrificed to leave space for dull stuff like plot exposition. And there are a few stories here in which there is just way too much plot ingenuity. But all the same, there are some real gems here: "Etoile du Nord" is a wonderfully bizarre interrogation story, in which the tables are turned between detective and suspect several times before Maigret works out what is going on (unfortunately, it's also one of the few places where Simenon lets Maigret act in an unnecessarily unpleasant way towards a woman character); "Tempete sur la Manche" makes memorable use of the contrast between action and provincial-boarding-house tedium; "L'auberge aux noyes" is simply dripping with bad weather and thirties atmosphere. ( )