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What was the woman doing here? In a stable, wearing pearl earrings, her stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes! She must have been alive when she got there because the crime had been committed after ten in the evening. But how? And why? And no one had heard a thing! She had not screamed. The two carters had not woken up. Maigret is standing in the pouring rain by a canal. A well-dressed woman, Mary Lampson, has been found strangled in a stable nearby. Why did her glamorous, hedonistic show more life come to such a brutal end here? Surely her taciturn husband Sir Walter knows - or maybe the answers lie with the crew of the barge La Providence. show lessTags
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Sir Walter Lampson, a retired English colonel who served in India, and his wife Mary have a very modern marriage, each openly with a lover. But, despite his supposed free-thinking ways, when Mary Lampson turns up dead in a stable, Sir Walter is the top suspect; he remains so when Willy Marco, Sir Walter’s general factotum and Mary’s lover, is found dead a day later.
While this second Maigret novel of Georges Simenon has also been published under the title of Lock 14, my favorite title under which it has been published in translation is Maigret Meets a Milord because that title highlights the subtle class satire evoked therein. I shall never forget the scene between the snobbish and pretentious chief magistrate who, dazzled by Sir show more Walter’s title and pedigree, makes an utter fool of himself. While Simenon was vehemently apolitical, he painted a comic picture of two aristocrats — one French and one English — coming to an understanding despite “the recent unpleasantness.”
Maigret novels aren’t for fans of non-stop suspense thrillers, nor for readers expecting intricate puzzles. Instead, the persistent Maigret uses psychology and an understanding that criminals are people like anyone else. Fans of Miss Jane Marple or Chief Inspector Morse might want to explore Simenon novels for their next favorite series. show less
While this second Maigret novel of Georges Simenon has also been published under the title of Lock 14, my favorite title under which it has been published in translation is Maigret Meets a Milord because that title highlights the subtle class satire evoked therein. I shall never forget the scene between the snobbish and pretentious chief magistrate who, dazzled by Sir show more Walter’s title and pedigree, makes an utter fool of himself. While Simenon was vehemently apolitical, he painted a comic picture of two aristocrats — one French and one English — coming to an understanding despite “the recent unpleasantness.”
Maigret novels aren’t for fans of non-stop suspense thrillers, nor for readers expecting intricate puzzles. Instead, the persistent Maigret uses psychology and an understanding that criminals are people like anyone else. Fans of Miss Jane Marple or Chief Inspector Morse might want to explore Simenon novels for their next favorite series. show less
In the very early morning of Monday, April 5, the body of a young woman is found in the stables next to Lock 14, the lock marking the junction of the canal and the river Marne. Detective Chief Inspector Maigret from the Flying Squad is dispatched to investigate the death and ends up spending the next few days wet and miserable, cycling between locks and chasing different vessels which slowly make their path through the locks of the canal and trying to find out what really happened. Figuring out who the woman was seems to be the easy part initially. Then it turns out that while it is clear who she had been for the last few years, her past is a different story so the team needs to untangle that mystery before they can figure out the show more death. A second dead body does not help matters much.
This is a very early novel in the series and it shows - it is rougher than some of the later ones and it can feel repetitive in places (but then isn't detective work repetitive?). But it shows a way of life in France that may have been familiar to a reader in 1931 but appears as ancient history in 2021. And that is the main strength of this novel - not just the story of the canal and its locks but all the back histories of the various characters which emerge through the short novel. Of course, it is from 1931 and the novel's depiction of some people (and especially the way some characters refer to others) sounds offensive to a modern ear but expecting something else from a 90-years old novel and applying our understanding of the world to it is unrealistic. show less
This is a very early novel in the series and it shows - it is rougher than some of the later ones and it can feel repetitive in places (but then isn't detective work repetitive?). But it shows a way of life in France that may have been familiar to a reader in 1931 but appears as ancient history in 2021. And that is the main strength of this novel - not just the story of the canal and its locks but all the back histories of the various characters which emerge through the short novel. Of course, it is from 1931 and the novel's depiction of some people (and especially the way some characters refer to others) sounds offensive to a modern ear but expecting something else from a 90-years old novel and applying our understanding of the world to it is unrealistic. show less
[Le Charretier de La Providence] (The Crime at Lock 14) - Georges Simenon
A very early Maigret novel written in the summer of 1930. It is collected in the Maigret Omnibus No. 1 and is the second story in that volume. The story has been filmed a number of times in French and there is an English version starring Rupert Davies. In this novel more than others I have read there is a sense of a time past because the story takes place along the canal system of La Marne at a time when the majority of the canal barges were still horse drawn. Progress was coming because there were disputes with the new motorised barges as to who should have precedence when passing through the locks. The Young Commissaire Maigret is called out when a body of a show more glamorously dressed woman is found beneath the straw in one of the stables that border on the canal.
His investigation is getting nowhere fast, when a second murder occurs during his investigation. A retired colonel from the British army who has sunk into alcoholism is edging his motorised cruiser through the busy canal system and has casually identified the woman as his wife. Maigret is at a loss as to how to deal with the nonchalance of those aboard the cruiser and resorts to painstakingly gathering clues along the towpath. He finds himself cycling some 70 kilometres calling on all the lock keepers in between in his search for information. Liaison with his headquarters is by telephones that can be found in cafés and some lock keepers cottages along the route and so Maigret has plenty of opportunities for refreshment and indulges himself with the brandy that is the colonel's preferred tipple. The men who care for and walk the large horses dragging along the barges start their day at 3 am in the morning to cover as much ground as possible and during Maigret's investigation it rarely stops raining: everything looks grey with a heavy depressing atmosphere.
This is a good story with the added interest of a view of a disappearing world. The heavy manual labour involved in leading the horses along the towpath sits uneasily with the colonel and his small crew bundled up inside their boat drinking themselves into oblivion. A four star read. show less
A very early Maigret novel written in the summer of 1930. It is collected in the Maigret Omnibus No. 1 and is the second story in that volume. The story has been filmed a number of times in French and there is an English version starring Rupert Davies. In this novel more than others I have read there is a sense of a time past because the story takes place along the canal system of La Marne at a time when the majority of the canal barges were still horse drawn. Progress was coming because there were disputes with the new motorised barges as to who should have precedence when passing through the locks. The Young Commissaire Maigret is called out when a body of a show more glamorously dressed woman is found beneath the straw in one of the stables that border on the canal.
His investigation is getting nowhere fast, when a second murder occurs during his investigation. A retired colonel from the British army who has sunk into alcoholism is edging his motorised cruiser through the busy canal system and has casually identified the woman as his wife. Maigret is at a loss as to how to deal with the nonchalance of those aboard the cruiser and resorts to painstakingly gathering clues along the towpath. He finds himself cycling some 70 kilometres calling on all the lock keepers in between in his search for information. Liaison with his headquarters is by telephones that can be found in cafés and some lock keepers cottages along the route and so Maigret has plenty of opportunities for refreshment and indulges himself with the brandy that is the colonel's preferred tipple. The men who care for and walk the large horses dragging along the barges start their day at 3 am in the morning to cover as much ground as possible and during Maigret's investigation it rarely stops raining: everything looks grey with a heavy depressing atmosphere.
This is a good story with the added interest of a view of a disappearing world. The heavy manual labour involved in leading the horses along the towpath sits uneasily with the colonel and his small crew bundled up inside their boat drinking themselves into oblivion. A four star read. show less
Finished reading
The canals of 1930s France host an insular riverine society all their own, a society governed by rythym and routine. Up and down the barges go, waiting their turn through the locks, carrying their cargos to and fro. Everyone knows everyone, and nothing much ever changes. All the more shocking, then, is the discovery in a canal-side stable of an unknown woman beneath the straw, very stylish, very pretty, and very dead.
The mystery that Inspector Maigret is called to pursue resolves into a fairly straightforward police procedural, but the real strength of the novel is its depiction of canal life nearly a century ago. Motorized barges are just starting to come into their own in competition with traditional horse-drawn craft. show more Lockkeepers, innkeepers, village shops along the canal, all make their living from the gypsy-like transportation industry moving up and down the waterway. This unique subculture, much like today's modern trucking industry if truckers literally lived in their trucks, comes to life as the backdrop for Maigret's methodical, dogged pursuit of an unknown killer on the move. show less
The canals of 1930s France host an insular riverine society all their own, a society governed by rythym and routine. Up and down the barges go, waiting their turn through the locks, carrying their cargos to and fro. Everyone knows everyone, and nothing much ever changes. All the more shocking, then, is the discovery in a canal-side stable of an unknown woman beneath the straw, very stylish, very pretty, and very dead.
The mystery that Inspector Maigret is called to pursue resolves into a fairly straightforward police procedural, but the real strength of the novel is its depiction of canal life nearly a century ago. Motorized barges are just starting to come into their own in competition with traditional horse-drawn craft. show more Lockkeepers, innkeepers, village shops along the canal, all make their living from the gypsy-like transportation industry moving up and down the waterway. This unique subculture, much like today's modern trucking industry if truckers literally lived in their trucks, comes to life as the backdrop for Maigret's methodical, dogged pursuit of an unknown killer on the move. show less
Very early Maigret (the second) with lots of nice 1930s French canal atmosphere — horse-drawn barges, lock-side cafés, and a yacht owned by an implausibly decadent former Indian Army colonel. Simenon's research on the canal culture (an area that obviously fascinated him, and which he was to revisit many times in the later Maigret stories) looks spot-on, but he apparently hadn't had much direct experience of les Anglais at that time: a decade or two later he'd have known that you don't address a knight as "Sir Surname"!
Not the first Maigret novel but written alongside eleven others in his first year of novel production (1931). Don't be fooled by the Penguin 'blurb', the definition of 'orgy' is little more than a noisy party by a few louche people on a pleasure yacht which is not my idea of one.
An early work showing Simenon moving from pulp serialisation into novelisation, it makes use of his knowledge of canals (he was an avid boater) in a series of short well constructed chapters that knows its original audience. Simenon writes simply and clearly and that is one of his great virtues.
It is an entertaining easy read set on the canal alongside the River Marne near Epernay between Paris and Rheims. In fact, Google will give you some good photographs of show more the sites in the novel but with spoilers if you go deeper than Images. Still, if you stop at Images, it will help understanding.
Frankly, the crime element is weak compared to an English Detection Club effort with a resolution (which I won't spell out for you) that is implausibly deduced along the lines of a French nineteenth century romance but that is not the point of reading a Simenon.
What is interesting is that Simenon shows us very early on that he is a master of descriptive psychology and of place and the interesection of both. Again, one always has to be wary of spoilers but Maigret is granted a thoughtful empathy that enables empathy in us.
The story was originally translated as 'Maigret Meets a Milord'. This picked on the humane depiction of a motley collection of losers surrounding a forcibly retired Indian Army Colonel which allows Simenon to depict a type of the English without caricature.
Similarly, he draws us a picture of the working class community around the locks and the barges which is like a snapshot of the early 1930s. There is a more romantic view of this world in Jean Vigo's 1934 film 'L'Atalante'.
Maigret himself is in some respects a cypher (perhaps like Simenon himself). He is the agent here not so much for uncovering wrong-doing (which he does) but for uncovering psychologies. show less
An early work showing Simenon moving from pulp serialisation into novelisation, it makes use of his knowledge of canals (he was an avid boater) in a series of short well constructed chapters that knows its original audience. Simenon writes simply and clearly and that is one of his great virtues.
It is an entertaining easy read set on the canal alongside the River Marne near Epernay between Paris and Rheims. In fact, Google will give you some good photographs of show more the sites in the novel but with spoilers if you go deeper than Images. Still, if you stop at Images, it will help understanding.
Frankly, the crime element is weak compared to an English Detection Club effort with a resolution (which I won't spell out for you) that is implausibly deduced along the lines of a French nineteenth century romance but that is not the point of reading a Simenon.
What is interesting is that Simenon shows us very early on that he is a master of descriptive psychology and of place and the interesection of both. Again, one always has to be wary of spoilers but Maigret is granted a thoughtful empathy that enables empathy in us.
The story was originally translated as 'Maigret Meets a Milord'. This picked on the humane depiction of a motley collection of losers surrounding a forcibly retired Indian Army Colonel which allows Simenon to depict a type of the English without caricature.
Similarly, he draws us a picture of the working class community around the locks and the barges which is like a snapshot of the early 1930s. There is a more romantic view of this world in Jean Vigo's 1934 film 'L'Atalante'.
Maigret himself is in some respects a cypher (perhaps like Simenon himself). He is the agent here not so much for uncovering wrong-doing (which he does) but for uncovering psychologies. show less
The second in the Maigret series (although there's some suggestion it could be the fourth although I've done zero fact checking one way or the other), this one really re-affirmed my decision to go right back to the start, and work my way through the audio versions of this series (the anti-semitism and casual racism in the first one nearly derailed the quest). Of course the timing of this series has to be taken into account so this time, so the vaguely censorial nature of the commentary of the victim, and the "set" she socialised in was sort of to be expected, although the slight sense of "longing" that came through in Maigret's observations wasn't what I'd expected at all.
Considerably more observational and reflective than the earlier show more entry as well, this is Maigret as I remember him. Standing in the pouring rain, or leaping onto a bicycle and heading up and down the canals, he's dogged and determined, but he's also almost funny in some places. And there are digs all the way through - brazen fleshed womenfolk protecting their men; a louche British colonel and his mistress; a retinue of people attached to the pleasure yacht that stands out amongst the working canal boats; and the hedonistic lifestyle of the pleasure seekers as opposed to the workers of the canal. At the centre of it all the pipe in mouth, pensive Maigret, sorting his way through a myriad of small, inconsequential bits of information to find the solution to how and why a well-dressed, glamorous woman like Mary Lampson (third wife of the aforementioned British colonel) ended up strangled in a stable wearing, of all things, her pearl earrings, a stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes.
All in all this outing was considerably more enjoyable than the earlier novel - it flowed really well, it was well constructed for audio, with a plot that you could really keep up with, and a storyline full of observations and descriptions that really drew out the sense of place and time (it seems Simenon was a boat enthusiast himself so he must have written what he knew about the people and canal life).
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/carter-la-providence-georges-simenon show less
Considerably more observational and reflective than the earlier show more entry as well, this is Maigret as I remember him. Standing in the pouring rain, or leaping onto a bicycle and heading up and down the canals, he's dogged and determined, but he's also almost funny in some places. And there are digs all the way through - brazen fleshed womenfolk protecting their men; a louche British colonel and his mistress; a retinue of people attached to the pleasure yacht that stands out amongst the working canal boats; and the hedonistic lifestyle of the pleasure seekers as opposed to the workers of the canal. At the centre of it all the pipe in mouth, pensive Maigret, sorting his way through a myriad of small, inconsequential bits of information to find the solution to how and why a well-dressed, glamorous woman like Mary Lampson (third wife of the aforementioned British colonel) ended up strangled in a stable wearing, of all things, her pearl earrings, a stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes.
All in all this outing was considerably more enjoyable than the earlier novel - it flowed really well, it was well constructed for audio, with a plot that you could really keep up with, and a storyline full of observations and descriptions that really drew out the sense of place and time (it seems Simenon was a boat enthusiast himself so he must have written what he knew about the people and canal life).
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/carter-la-providence-georges-simenon show less
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The prolific Belgian-born writer Georges Simenon produced hundreds of fictional works under his own name and 17 pseudonyms, in addition to more than 70 books about Inspector Maigret, long "the favorite sleuth of highbrow detective-story readers" (SR). More than 50 "Simenons" have been made into films. In addition to his mystery stories, he wrote show more what he called "hard" books, the serious psychological novels numbering well over 100. The autobiographical Pedigree, set in his native town of Liege, is perhaps his finest work. The publication of Simenon's intimate memoirs also attracted considerable attention. Simenon himself once said that he would never write a "great novel." Yet Gide called him "a great novelist, perhaps the greatest and truest novelist we have in French literature today," and Thornton Wilder (see Vol. 1) found that Simenon's narrative gift extends "to the tips of his fingers." The following are some of Simenon's novels, exclusive of the Maigret detective stories, that are in print. (Bowker Author Biography) Georges Simenon was born on February 13, 1903 in Liege, Belgium. He wrote more than 200 fiction works under 16 different pseudonyms. His first book, The Case of Peter the Lent led to 80 more of the like including the main character, Inspector Maigret. He published over 400 books that were translated into 50 different languages and sold by the millions. He also wrote psychological novels, including The Man Who Watched the Train Go By. He died on September 4, 1989 in Lausanne. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Crime at Lock 14
- Original title
- Le Charretier de la Providence, 1963
- Alternate titles
- Maigret Meets a Milord; Lock 14; The Carter of La Providence
- Original publication date
- 1931-03; 1934 (in English) (in English)
- People/Characters
- Jules Maigret; Sir Walter Lampson; Mary Lampson; Willy Marco; Vladimir; Gloria Negretti (show all 7); Jean
- Important places*
- Epernay, Frankrijk; Dizy, Frankrijk
- First words
- Nothing could be deduced from the most minute reconstruction of the facts , except that the find by the two carters from Dizy was so to speak impossible.
The facts of the case, though meticulously reconstructed, proved precisely nothing -- except that the discovery made by the two carters from Dizy made, frankly, no sense at all. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And the skipper and his wife had gone off into the town to order mourning clothes.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The skipper and his wife had gone into town, to buy clothes for the funeral. - Original language*
- Frans
- Disambiguation notice
- In the French original,
Le charretier de "la Providence" (1931).
Variously published in English as:
(i) "The Crime at Lock 14," with "The Shadow on the Courtyard" (1934), and in The T... (show all)riumph of Inspector Maigret (1934) (trans. Anthony Abbot);
(ii) Maigret Meets a Milord (1963), and with the same title in the omnibus Maigret Meets a Milord (with "Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets" and "Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett"; 1983); and as Lock 14 (2003) (trans. Robert Baldick);
and (iii) The Carter of "La Providence" (trans. David Coward) (2014).
Please distinguish between the stand-alone title Maigret Meets a Milord and the 1983 omnibus of the same name which includes other works.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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