Translated by Howard Curtis and Ros Schwartz
‘It was an absolute classic case. Maigret had always claimed that it if weren’t for chance fifty per cent of criminals would escape punishment, and that without tip-offs another fifty per cent would remain free. It sounded like a joke, especially when he said it in that thick voice of his.’ (Rue Pigalle).
It’s not so much a joke as a paradox. In this story, as in so much of the Maigret oeuvre, the Chief Inspector claims to know nothing while sitting in stillness at the heart of the mystery and eventually revealing the truth. If this is a ‘chance’ it’s a Pascalian gamble of a chance.
There are seventeen stories in this new collection, first published in various journals during the 1930s, then in the collection ‘Maigret’s Pipe’ during the Second World War. Their locations range from grubby canalside locks to manicured country mansions, with bodies found in train compartments, in squalid hotels, on Paris park benches; where murderers are driven to kill because of greed, lust or vengeance; because of poverty or low-level criminality; or sometimes just from despair at the realization of what life might have been. As Simenon says, ‘A commonplace story of unremarkable people.’ (The Boulevard Beaumarchais Case.)
And yet, there is always Chief Inspector Jules Maigret: pacing, waiting, often sullen, quite often mystified, turning up his velvet collar, lighting his pipe, putting out his pipe, playing with his pipe.
Maigret has no method, we are told. He is famous for having no method. Reporters sneaking a look at his notebook find only random notes, or even a shopping list. These stories are driven by hunches.
‘As he walked [Madame Laget] to the door, Maigret was still trying to clarify the sensation he had had on entering Laget’s office. There were moments when he thought he was getting there, but a second later the memory became as vague as before.’ (The Open Window).
In ‘Death Penalty’ he follows two young lovers by train from Paris’s Gare du Nord to Brussels, brazenly taking a seat in their compartment. Jehan d’Oulmont and his mistress Sonia Lipchitz know that he’s on their trail. There is no evidence; the young man has a perfect alibi. ‘The truth was, Maigret knew nothing. Maigret felt. Maigret was sure he was right… but the law requires proof, and Maigret was still searching…’
And with the brief, shocking denouement, Simenon ends the story, ‘Maigret at last was free to think of something else.’
These stories, although early works, are already toying with the idea of Maigret’s retirement. We find Maigret tending to his tomatoes in the garden of his home in Meung sur Loire, called back to duties by a pressing and mysterious case. Simenon enjoys the tension between town and country; his Chief Inspector is often pulled away from calm, warm sunshine back to the smoke and criminality of the city. Or sometimes, conversely, leaving the freezing fog of the Loire valley and finding himself in Paris, where the ‘Grands Boulevards were bathed in a bright May sunshine and everyone was dressed for spring.’ Because ‘he wasn’t as happy in his garden as he would have people believe and, like a novice, he was excited by the first mystery to come his way.’ (Mademoiselle Berthe’s Lover).
All of human frailty is here, from the tight-knit hatreds of family feuds to the workmanlike criminality of gangsters just doing their job. Simenon’s gaze, through Maigret, is constantly alighting on particular types of people: men who are high-status, tall and patrician, with well-cut suits; women in tailored dresses and pillbox hats, who appear respectable but have lovers, or clients. A man who is ‘physically the kind of man you meet a lot in the business districts, whether selling vacuum cleaners or fiddling his commission.’ (Maigret Gets It Wrong). And there are the working people: bargemen, blacksmiths, bartenders, chauffeurs, impoverished dressmakers in small Parisian upper rooms.
The weather, too, creates the mood. In the ‘Inn of the Drowned,’ where a car containing a dead body is pulled out of the river Loing, Maigret finds himself under ‘a low cold sky. Slanting sheets of rain. The river a dirty brown, and beyond, poplar trees bordering the canal.’ In ‘The Hanged Couple, ‘Maigret sullen as the Seine itself, as sullen as a canal in the rain, had come back to his lock and couldn’t tear himself away from it.’
Again, in the oppressive heat of a Paris summer, with the removal of jackets, the loosening of ties, a storm in the air – a man, who sits every day on the same bench, is one day found dead. This story has Maigret still living in Paris near the Place de la Republique (but not the later apartment of the novels). It is also one of the few stories to feature Madame Maigret as a player in the story, to the extent that Maigret is seen to ‘wince, furious that his wife had come to the same conclusions as him, goodness knows how…’ (Madame Maigret’s Suitor).
There is the poetry of the domestic: a dressmaker’s cup of pins, a canary in a cage, tea rooms where everything is ‘bright, sugary and scented’, dusky moonlit gardens. An ancient rural shop where ‘The light was as sparse as in an old master painting, and the furniture and walls had that same colour… with brown and grey patches in the gloom, and here and there a gleam of light on a jar or a brass fitting.’ (Candle Wax).
And the food. Of course. How often recipes are quoted, meals described: sardines and potato salad, sole Normande, ‘tripes a la mode de Caen’, ‘Veal fricandeau with sorrel sauce.’ And Calvados. Or Marc. Or pints of Belgian beer.
There are the generalizations: certain women who ‘have believed in human duplicity for so long that they cannot imagine they are being told the truth for once, even if it is only by chance.’ Or, ‘these honest, sad-looking men who [always] have sick wives to take care of…’ And ‘the little world of Montmartre, with its hardworking people content with small pleasures.’
This last is from a story of mysterious letters sent from a possible killer to his mistress, a dressmaker. (Mademoiselle Berthe’s Lover.) When Maigret leaves the dressmaker’s rooms, removing a length of thread stuck to his sleeve, ‘he was not happy. He didn’t know why. And as he went down the six flights of stairs, he wondered what he was going to do.’ In this, as so often, Simenon deftly allies mood with a kind of moral feeling. In ‘The Notary from Chateauneuf’, the lawyer in the Loire disturbs Maigret from his retirement gardening and leads him to a perfect house with three lovely daughters, where the whiteness of the gravel of the garden path seems to represent a kind of purity now besmirched by mysterious theft, and where ‘when you walked around the lounge, the crystal prisms on the chandelier tinkled softly’. Maigret is crushed by the realization that ‘a simple theft of ivory objects can become more poignant, in certain circumstances, than all the bloody crimes dealt with by the Police Judiciaire.’
There is also Maigret’s morality concerning sex. Simenon’s own obsession with sex, with his lived-out fantasy of the constant availability of women, is transmuted in these stories into something else, something redemptive, where Maigret with his solid and faithful marriage can look upon a woman who is beautiful, or sexual, or careless about her morals, and not have the response that Simenon himself would have. In the dressmaker’s rooms in Montmartre, Maigret ‘was uneasy to find himself there, in this youthful, feminine atmosphere, like a married man indulging in a peccadillo.’ (Mademoiselle Berthe’s Lover).
Simenon allows Maigret to be the man he, Simenon, is unable to be. And yet, I would assert there is one place where the two men meet: in a place of rage. Simenon is angry, in particular, when a man who is unworthy of a woman’s love seems to gain it in spite of his feebleness. In ‘The Boulevard Beaumarchais Case’ Ferdinand Voivin is ‘the kind of person who, for fear of solitude, is quite capable of dragging lots of people to their death with him.’ The man is ‘lugubrious’, ‘sickly’ ‘mediocre in everything, even in his desperation’. And yet his mistress is chic, blonde and young. Maigret/Simenon can hardly bear it.
Where we see this heartland self in its most concentrated form, perhaps, is in Maigret Gets it Wrong; where a creepy seller of erotic fiction spies on his customers through a two-way mirror, deep in the basement cellar of a respectable neighbourhood. Above ground there are ‘people healthy in body and mind walking up there in the street in the cool winter air,’ and yet below, in this tiny fetid space, the informer watches men with their tawdry exchanges. Maigret wants to punch this ‘horrible fellow’. Maigret knew ‘the innermost secrets of the flesh pedlars of Montmartre and the dream pedlars of Montparnasse… but never had he descended into a basement like this or peered through the spyhole of someone like Labri.’ His dislike for the man shocks: when he first meets Labri, the man smiles ‘one of those smiles that Maigret felt like flattening with his fist.’ And at the end, this is just what happens: Maigret, driven to mad rage by the fate of the young woman of the story, says, ‘“I got it wrong. It happens to everyone.”’ And then ‘landed his fist full in the man’s face.’ The rage is at the heart of the story, and perhaps at the heart of the whole collection. The fact that Labri is ‘one of those Frenchman born in Cairo or Port Said,’ the fact he has ‘velvet eyes’, he’s fat and creepy and heartless, and this naïve young woman has fallen in love with him – Maigret gets it wrong, and his rage comes from his own wrongness. The man has broken no laws and yet Simenon will have him as one of the worst kind of men we meet in the whole collection – which is why Maigret aims a very hard punch at his face. Crucially, he does so having ‘glanced around to make sure that he was really in a cellar; far from life and its laws.’ Race, desire, vice, subterfuge and police informers – everything is wrong in this story. Including Maigret.
The punch on the mouth shocks because it is deliberately out of character. Simenon is master of the everyday nature of crime. He isn’t interested in evil – but he’s very interested in sin. The Catholic sensibility of his upbringing is a background pulse, a belief that human beings are mired in sin and sometimes it gets the better of us.
Maigret is (nearly) always a blunt, astute, forgiving presence. He bestows, if not a blessing, then a wry glance, or a sympathetic pat on a shoulder – an understanding of why the person he is banging up in the slammer has done what they have done. Through Maigret, Simenon gives his criminals, and himself, the chance of redemption.
Published by Penguin Books
Alison Joseph is the author of the Sister Agnes series of crime novels. Her radio adaptations of Simenon’s novels, starring Nicholas le Prevost as Jules Maigret, have aired on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
