Product Description
The tidal regularity of life in a quiet village is broken when the local harbor-master is murdered, and Inspector Maigret must force the killer into the open by using all of his famous instincts. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Drath of A Harbor-Master

Classic Maigret as he faces a wall of silence in a coastal port.
In trying to solve the inexplicable injuries to the Harbor-Master, Maigret is befriended by the denizens of the local tavern - sailors and locksmen - who enjoy his company and tell him nothing, despite the fact that they have most of the pieces of the puzzle.

Sinister seamen guard a secret
Simenon was clearly drawn to obscure ports. He achieves the terse intensity of haiku with his offhand descriptions of busy locks, clanking winches and turbulent weather.

And in the fog-drenched atmosphere of this book, we encounter a bizarre mystery right from the start.

A middle-aged man is found wandering around Paris acting strangely. A wig falls off his head to reveal that a bullet has split his skull and been expertly patched! He can't talk, seems to have no memory of anything. He just smiles amiably!

Photos circulate to the papers and finally his chic young housekeeper Julie identifies him as Captain Joris, harbor-master of the little coastal town of Ouistreham.

And Maigret is off to Ouistreham with the Captain and Julie to solve the mystery of the Captain's strange condition. Shockingly, the Captain is murdered his first night home.

Wherever Maigret goes, and he goes everywhere, he encounters a conspiracy of silence. And he's quite certain everybody knows something.

The story is rich in astonishing scenes and strange behavior. I loved it.

Who Would Kill an Amnesiac Who Was Mute
A man in nice clothing is found wandering around Paris.He is unable to speak and has a surgical scar under the wig he is wearing.There are no labels in his clothing and no identity papers in his pockets.After putting his picture in the paper, a woman arrives in Paris to tell Maigret that he is the Harbor-Master from a small town on the coast.She is his housekeeper, and he disappeared six weeks ago.

Maigret accompanies the two of them back to the little town on the coast, and on the first day home, someone poisons the Harbor-Master.The housekeeper is distraught and everyone else in town is silent.What is this all about?As always, Maigret will get to the bottom of this problem, but how will he get the stiff-necked Bretons to tell him what is going on?

Once again, Simenon shows his great capacity to help readers envision these Pre-WW2 towns on the fringes of France.His narrative and description of the people and their attitudes are as always and entre into a world that no longer exist. ... Read more

Product Description
On the outskirts of Paris, a prostitute is found murdered in a vacant lot. In a seedy apartment house nearby lives pasty, fat Mr. Hire. Mr. Hire, who earns his living through a petty postal scam, is a convicted pornographer, a peeping Tom, and, once a week, the unlikely star of a Parisian bowling club, where people think he works for the police. He is a faceless man of regular habits who keeps to himself and gives his neighbors the creeps. After the murder, Mr. Hire’s concierge points a finger at him: he was out late the night of the crime. The police have the suspect under 24-hour surveillance. They are only waiting for him to make the inevitable mistake and give himself away.

Except that creepy Mr. Hire is in fact an innocent man, whose only mistake is to have fallen head-over-heels in love with the wrong girl.

One of the most chilling and compassionate of Simenon’s extraordinary psychological novels, The Engagement explores the mystery of a blameless heart in a compromised soul. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

An unfair fate
Monsieur Hire is not a heroic figure - a flabby little man with a thin moustache and a sleazy occupation. He's brilliant at bowling and clueless around women.

One day he has the misfortune to cut his cheek shaving. The concierge, delivering some mail to his room, sees a bloody towel in the background. Instantly she associates this with the prostitute who was murdered and found in an empty lot in the neighborhood.

If only M. Hire had not cut his cheek, if only there'd been no corpse nearby, if only the concierge understood that M. Hire was quietly at home on the night of the murder, and if only M. Hire had not fallen in love with the dangerous girl in the dairy shop - the poor man would have been left in peace.

But random events often change the course of a human life in Simenon's "hard" or literary novels.

This book was originally published in l933. It's beautifully crafted, but not the best choice of reading matter on a day you need cheering up. Nonetheless, Monsieur Hire is a wonderful character, and it's probably worth a small dose of depression to become acquainted with him.

Simenonic genius
Georges Simeon was the ultimate spy.He perched on the edge of everyone's lives and wrote down in novel form exactly what he saw.The characters in his novels are more real than the characters in real life. All of the action takes place in a field that can only be described as the color gray-the rain cloud field in which our human tragedies and redemptions occur.

I don't know why in lists of great writers of the twentieth century Simenon is not listed - up there with the likes of Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Lovecraft, Chesterton, Djuna Barnes, and all of the other players.Simenon was born for the twentieth century - it finds its most major representation in no other writer.

"Even from Mr. Hire's room, the goose bumps on her skin were visible."
No question that for Simenon, less is more, as this enormously talented writer in "The Engagement" sketches out the essential lines of his protagonists and their rather drab and robotic lives with such skill that he engages us at every turn. What's real to Simenon is desire, greed, and death. There's little room here for sentiment, and if you're looking for a sweet confection, you've definitely entered the wrong door.

Simenon has created a "modern" twentieth-century man, Mr. Hire, who really has no spiritual or moral center. He simply is a collection of habits and fears, spiced with perverse self-flagellating pleasures and one great but rather ridiculous skill. His alienation from society, which itself is presented as crude and hard and bordering on a violent mob, is sad and almost understandable, considering his dysfunctionality may have a basis in the gross nature of those who surround him. Yet his one soft spot is the highly sexual dairy maid, Alice, who lives directly across from him. Her little piece of paradise is so close that he can see right into her windows.

So goes this Hitchcockian plot as Mr. Hire's robotic life is disrupted by this seductress and by the police. Underlying this plot is Simenon's writing machinery, which carries with it a valueless worldview. The author is really telling us we all amount to very little in the end: a collection of habits, enactments of our desires, and vain hopes for a better life. Why we are who we are is not of any significance to what we do while we are here in this life.

I found this work to be extraordinary in its philosophical and psychological implications. Simenon was way ahead of his time as a writer and thinker. Not only that, his selection of detail and his ability to draw up whole scenes through the skillful use of the five senses could teach many a writer how to make the page come alive.

When the Internal and External Collide
When a prostitute is murdered in an abandoned lot, all eyes look towards Mr. Hire as the suspect.The reader can certainly understand why.Hire makes his income in a petty postal scam and his main hobby is peeping on the woman across the courtyard as she undresses.His past is no better, with a conviction for petty sex offenses and some time in prison.No wonder the guy is in the crosshairs.

Yet THE ENGAGEMENT is one of Simenon's roman durs (hard novels) with more of a noir edge to them.Hire is innocent of the crime but, as is true for the roman durs, hardly innocent in any other application of the term.Hire's apparently empty internal world collides with the external as Hire realizes that some others, specifically the police, do not consider him to be as inconsequential as he thought.The scene in which Hire discovers at the train station that he is being watched and followed was among the most simple yet powerful scenes I have encountered of a character's horror at having his comfortable little world disturbed through no fault of one's own.

Despite his initial shock, Hire soon comes to enjoy being the center of someone's attention and starts showing off for the detectives on his tail.This excitement is heightened when the girl on whom Hire peeps starts showing some romantic interest.But in a morally vacuous world, it is all a ruse.Hire is being played for the sap.Even if the police knew of Hire's innocence, it is questionable whether they would care.They show the same apathy towards the lives of others as everyone else and seem less concerned with nabbing the real murderer than they are in getting the case behind them.They are just playing a different role in the game.

In his roman durs, Simenon shows no concern for issues of right and wrong.The amorality of the world simply is a given in which people are thrust and left to their own devices.It is an interesting world to visit while hoping we never find ourselves as its tenants.

"You shall become engaged to a woman
but another man shall lie with her." Deuteronomy 28:30

Georges Simenon was nothing if not prolific in both his literary and public life. Born in Belgium in 1903, Simenon turned out hundreds of novels. Simenon's obsession with writing caused him to break off an affair (he was prolific in this area of his life as well) with the celebrated Josephine Baker in Paris when he could only write twelve novels in the twelve month period in which they were involved. Although perhaps best known for his Inspector Maigret detective novels, Simenon also wrote over a hundred novels that he referred to as `romans durs' (literally "hard novels").These hard stories typically involve a person's descent from normality (or a life that seems to bear the appearance of normality) into nihilism and despair.Usually there is a triggering event, a murder, a bankruptcy, or simply too much to drink on a road trip.The publishing arm of `"The New York Review" NYRB Books is reissuing Simenon's hard novels."The Engagement" is one of Simenon's earliest hard novels and it was hard to put down. The story line is rather a simple one.

Mr. Hire is a quiet man. But he isn't quiet in the way that he blends into the background. He's quiet in the way that his neighbors find him odd and more than a bit scary.Odd in such a way that children are pulled into their parent's apartment when he is heard walking around in his Paris apartment.And, critically for "The Engagement", odd in such a way that when a neighborhood prostitute is found murdered, the concierge in his apartment tells the police Hire is the culprit."The Engagement" is a study in contrasts.It gives us Mr. Hire, going about his daily business and gives us the police (with the helpful assistance of Hire's neighbors) going about their business and slowly obtaining enough information to arrest him for murder.

The storyline may not sound unique but the devil is always in the details. Simenon's prose may be direct and to the point but he manages to paint a compelling picture of his protagonists.Mr. Hire, the concierge, and the young girl across the street with whom Mr. Hire shares a voyeuristic relationship that holds the key to the story line, are all wonderfully drawn.Hire is not an attractive person yet this reader could not help but feel no small amount of empathy toward.It is hard to give examples without divulging too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that Simenon knows how to craft sentences that keep the reader turning page after page after page.

Simenon's hard novels are often referred to as psychological novels but I find that term a bit misleading.Simenon does not analyze. He does not delve deep into his protagonists' minds.He presents a story stripped of moralizing or analysis. He presents the reader with a slice of the human condition, usually an unpleasant slice, and lets the reader deal with the implications, the psychoanalysis if you like.They do offer glimpses into his protagonists' lives even though (or perhaps because) he does not fill in the blanks for you.His character's actions speak for themselves and what they have to say is not always pleasant.In a world of fiction filled with happiness and redemption and the ultimate triumph of good against evil, Simenon is a breath of fresh (if pessimistic) air. I recommend highly all of Simenon's romans durs and The Engagement is no exception.L. Fleisig
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Product Description
At nineteen, Frank Friedmaier is thief, pimp and murderer. He has never known his father, his mother keeps a brothel. His mind is cold and inhospitable. But Simenon reveals the obsession with self-torture that lurks within it, and explores the intricate psychology of a young criminal, even lending the repellent Frank a chilling grandeur as he faces remorseless interrogation and his fate. A bleak and brilliant masterpiece from Simenon at his superlative best. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

formidable
Anglophones know Simenon from the endless pot-boiler Maigret novels. This one is up several notches on Maigret. Superb atmosphere and setting in wartime occupation. A sort of melange of"Crime and Punishment", "Catcher in the Rye" and "Darkness at Noon" but superior to all three. A movie adaptation was made in 1953 but hard to see how it could do justice to this; the apex of criminal psychological writing. ... Read more

Product Description
Three vintage Maigret novels by legendary mystery author Georges Simenon

One of the world -s most successful crime writers, Georges Simenon has thrilled mystery lovers since 1931 with his matchless creation Inspector Maigret. In My Friend Maigret, Inspector Maigret investigates the murder of a small-time crook on a Mediterranean island. Told in Simenon-s spare, unsentimental prose, Inspector Cadaver is a haunting exploration of provincial hypocrisy and snobbery, in which Maigret encounters a rival sleuth from his past. In Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard, Simenon-s tenacious detective pieces together the life of a man who for three years lived a secret life-until he is found stabbed to death in an alleyway. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Enjoyable Maigret with a little deja vu
Interesting that this Maigret mystery novella was originally published during WWII, but makes no mention of that event or any other "time marker."In any event, "Inspector Cadaver" takes Paris Inspector Superintendent Maigret to a small village in the Vendee area of France.The locals refer to it as the Green Venice, but it is otherwise a quiet agricultural area where crime, especially murder, happens on a modest scale.A young man has been killed on the railway that passes through the area and there are locals who believe that the death was no accident.Fingers point to the family that Maigret has been asked by a colleague to assist through the investigation.

The mystery is eventually resolved, though justice is not done.Watching Maigret sort it out is the sweet part, but the way that author Simenon evokes the social structure and daily habits of village life are also extremely enjoyable.The book is a good example of Simenon's flawless story-telling, his portrayal of complicated human behaviors and his sense of place.

SPOILER (of sorts) - my only small quibble with this book is that it resembles a bit too closely the novella, "Maigret in Holland," with which a lot of the story line intersects.

Maigret on a mission
An examining magistrate asks a favor of Maigret. Would he mind visiting the little town of Saint-Aubin for an unofficial investigation? The truth, as determined by Maigret, is bound to squash some ridiculous gossip about his brother-in-law.

Maigret stays with the well-connected country family and finds them charming, sincere and hospitable.

Nonetheless, there is that ugly rumor that the daughter of the house had a lover, and his murderer was her father.

And how to explain the presence in the neighborhood of the ex-policeman known as Old Cadaver, dismissed in disgrace long ago from the force and now a private detective?

This is an excellent little story. A few awkward moments for Maigret make it all the more enjoyable.

new book
Since this is a Christmas present it has not been read yet.Knowing how well the author writes I am sure it will be enjoyed.

Not One of Simenon's Best
A colleague asks Inspector Maigret to go to small village on the Atlantic Coast to help his family sort out a problem.A young man has died and villagers are beginning to gossip.The hope is that Maigret will be able to quiet the malicious rumors.What Maigret finds is a village divided into two factions.Those spreading the rumors and those hiding a village secret.

Readers usually see Inspector Maigret in his Parisian element.In most of his novels, he deploys a team of detectives as he rushes to solve crimes.But in the end, we know that the mystery will always be solved due to Maigret penetrating psychological insights.What makes "Inspector Cadaver" interesting is that Maigret is out of his element.The villagers are not Parisians and he does not have his team of detectives to help him out. He is going to have to solve this mystery only with his knowledge of human behavior.

Georges Simenon had an amazing career.He wrote over four hundred novels of which seventy five featured his detective hero, Inspector Jules Maigret.Over the years, publishers have printed over 500 million copies of his work.Like any great stylist, some of his works are better than others.Unfortunately, "Inspector Cadaver" is not one his better mysteries.Yet, like Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra even his lesser works are better than average.

Place de la Peyton
Georges Simenon was the author of over 100 Inspector Maigret mystery stories. They were immensely popular in the 1930s through the 1960s. Inspector Maigret stories also appeared in film and TV versions. Simenon also authored dozens of books described as "romans durs", or `hard stories' that had a darker tone than his Maigret novels. Simenon seems to have fallen under the radar in recent decades but in recent years he seems to have been rediscovered by a new generation of mystery/detective story fans. Penguin Books has begun to reissue some of those Maigret mysteries (usually in groups of three mysteries) and the New York Review of Books Press has reissued many of his `romans durs'."Inspector Cadaver is one of Penguin's latest Inspector Maigret Mystery reissues, along with My Friend Maigret (Inspector Maigret Mysteries) and Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard (Inspector Maigret).

"Inspector Cadaver" finds Maigret in the village of Saint-Aubin-les Marais. Although the town itself is fictional it is planted by Simenon squarely in the Vendee region of France, southwest of Paris near the Atlantic coast.Simenon lived in the area during WWII (the story was originally published in 1943 under the title "Maigret's Rival") and, as portrayed by Simenon, Saint-Aubin was an isolated, self-contained area which rivals Peyton Place as far as its perchance for gossip and sense of isolation from the rest of the world is concerned.

Maigret finds himself in Saint-Aubin at the request of a Magistrate in Paris. A young working-class man has been found dead apparently run over by a train.The town gossip seems to point its ugly finger in the direction of the Magistrate's brother-in-law and Maigret agrees (reluctantly) to travel to Saint-Aubin to help the brother-in-law out.Maigret is surprised to discover that a former policeman, Inspector Cavre (known as Inspector Cadaver) now working as a private detective, is also destined for Saint-Aubin.As the plot develops Maigret and the reader is introduced to life in this isolated village.Simenon does a wonderful job describing the sense of isolation Maigret feels at entering into this self-contained and xenophobic world.Maigret's unofficial investigation is made more complex (but more interesting to the reader) as he deals with old family ties, small town snobbery, class-distinctions, and a general aversion to strangers.The efforts by Inspector Cadaver also make Maigret's life more difficult (and actually lead me to conclude that the original title is the more apt of the two.)

Simenon's Inspector Maigret mysteries are often compared to Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries. There are many resemblances to be sure. There are some major differences however worth noting. The chief differences seem to me to be Simenon's darker touch and his rather cynical feelings toward the more `respectable' members of French society. This is very evident in "Inspector Cadaver" but it is not so intrusive that it gets in the way of the story. Simenon treats words with respect and doesn't use more than seems necessary to advance the story."Inspector Cadaver" is an excellent example of the story-telling art of Georges Simenon and well worth reading.L. Fleisig
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Product Description
Georges (Joseph Chrétien) Simenon (1903-1989) was a renowned Belgian-French novelist. Obsessed by writing, Simenon may well be one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century: he wrote more than 400 novels, half of them using 20 different pseudonyms. His first novel under his own name was The Case of Peter the Lett (1931), in which he introduced one of the best-known characters in detective fiction, the pipe-smoking Parisian police detective Inspector Maigret. He wrote some 80 more Maigret novels, as well as 130 psychological novels, numerous short stories, and autobiographical works. The central theme running through his fiction is the isolated existence of the neurotic, abnormal individual. The renowned French literature expert Lucille Becker dives behind the mountain of writing and finds new insights into how much of Simenon's life influenced his writing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Definitive and seminal
This is the definitive, seminal study of Simenon. Nothing else comes close. This is the benchmark for all Simenon fans and scholars. Becker is to be thanked for delivering a classic. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good collection of late Simenon novels.
Maigret and Monsieur Charles was the last Maigret novel to be written and published (1972). Simenon announced his retirement the following year. In this novel, Maigret explores the world of nightclubs and unhappy marriages. Simenon paints a startlingly clear picture of a bitterly unhappy woman who fails to get what she wants from her marriage. It isn't a sympathetic portrait, precisely, and the lack of sympathy can be troubling. Still, very acute. If the first Maigret books were often more of an exploration of place and culture, this should be seen as an exploration of character. Worthy finisher to the series.

The Disappearance of Odette (1971) is one of Simenon's short psychological novels, and probably the most interesting of those I have read so far. If you know a bit about Simenon's life, it is difficult not to read autobiography into the text. Which probably isn't fair. Odile is the depressed disaffected daughter of a great writer who goes to Paris to kill herself. The book is written from the point of view of her brother, who goes looking for her to save her life. (Simenon's daughter Mary-Jo killed herself in 1978.) I found it a very affecting book. Affecting and effective-- simple, moving and unpretentious. Simenon as the writer I love so much from the Maigret novels, but which I've often found missing in his psychological works.

The Cat is also one of the short psychological Simenon novels. It is a singularly unpleasant book. It tells the story of a couple in their 70s who stopped speaking to each other after killing each other's pets years ago. As difficult as the subject matter it shows Simenon's style to perfection-- short terse sentences, flat and sympathetic treatment of characters. An excellent example of his work, even if the plot means that it will never be one of my personal favorites. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Here's another good book out of print
Georges Simenon, as everybody knows, was a Belgian who went to live in Switzerland. Well, that's about what I knew of the fellow before reading this interesting partial autobiography. I think it says somewhere at the beginning that he had intended not to write about himself ever, but that some event involving a child of his changed his mind. Whatever the reason, this look at part of a writer's hectic life is not without interest.

Simenon lived in a mist of rumour and legend. Of course, this was largely of his own making and he does little to correct matters in the book. Although known as something of a, to put it politely, lover of women's company, he does not go into this Paris Match side of things at all. Instead, he lets us see a bit of the inner man, or what a clever writer may be selling to us as such, and, all the criticism of him after his death notwithstanding, I for one felt that I got somewhat closer to the enigma. It was almost as if he was saying (in about 1963) that he wasn't such a bad fellow after all.

There is much of interest to anyone wondering about the author of Maigret, but precious little about Maigret himself. Just some tedious details of how he could write a novel a week and live rather handsomely without even getting tendinitis. It's hard to know how you can take Georges Simenon seriously. He led a charmed life in many ways, and his famous temper (like that of Peter Sellers) and love of womankind if not mankind, made him a force to be reckoned with. In "When I Was Old," we get a glimpse of the man who held millions in thrall for so many years. It's worth the look. ... Read more

Product Description
Maigret, accompanying his physician on an emergency call, is drawn into one of his most stubborn cases yet. The victim, a son of a wealthy perfume manufacturer, had been enjoying an odd hobby before his death: collecting human voices with a tape recorder, often in the rougher districts of Paris. But his wallet and his tape recorder have been left untouched, so the killer's motive is unclear. The absence of clues begins to exasperate Maigret until an anonymous letter reveals that he is dealing with no ordinary criminal.

Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon.
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Customer Reviews (5)

Maigret is quite cool
This is my second Maigret book. Simenon seems always to be a good read. This is a man who knows his metier. In this book the social indignation of Simenon seems to surface quite explicit, since Maigret feels quite much compassion towards the murderer, seemingly more than with the victim. It's quite amazing to me how undeveloped and backwards the France of Simenon is, the man obviously felt a need for improvement of the country. One bad thing about this novel is that Maigret seems to be too familar, friendly and understanding with the murderer, it's not quite credible.

Never fails
Simenon's Chief Inspector Maigret never fails to take me to Paris, to enfold me into the city's daily life and the problems of solving a crime.This is accomplished by an economy of language that somehow includes all the details necessary to create a lucid scene.

This novel begins on a rainy night when Maigret accompanies his doctor friend on an amergency call:a man has been stabbed on a nearby sidewalk.It is no ordinary victim.He is the young son of a wealthy perfume manufacturer.The victim's hobby is secretly taping conversations wherever he goes.It is a pastime that proved fatal--or did it?

Maigret's investigation takes him to cafes and brasseries, from the wealthy to the poor, and piece by piece he solves the crime.Or, perhaps, it should be said that Maigret lets the killer play out and solve the case on his own.In either case it is the journey, not the solution, that ntrigues.There are the sights, and sounds, and smells of Paris.As usual, Maigret chats with his wife, goes to movies, andpauses often to have a beer or wine and to reflect on what he has uncovered to date.

Any lover of crime fiction who has not yet discovered Georges Simenon should do so immediately.Like Arthur Conan Doyle, he is one of the best, not just of crime fiction but of fiction writing in general.

A man who crossed a barrier
The Maigrets ate on a monthly basis with Dr. Pardon and his wife.Dr. Pardon complained that medical doctors were being changed into clerks because of all of the paperwork required of them.Superintendent Maigret and Dr. Pardon went out to see a young man lying in the street, a victim of stabbing.Maigret had become involved in the case involuntarily.

In reporting the death to the family, Maigret learned that the young man's parents were very rich.The father was a perfume manufacturer.The young man had had few friends.He had an unusual hobby, recording conversations.The tape recorder was recovered.

The tale is taut, lucid.

When Maigret meets a serial killer ...
When Maigret meets a serial killer, it's a dramatic face to face and, as usually, Maigret can understand why the killer acts in such an horrible way. Maigret don't excuse the killer but can understand. Like said Simenon : "Understand but not judge".

Great stuff, one of the best Maigrets
This is one of my very favorite Simenon novels; superbly paced and brilliant characterizations. ... Read more

Product Description
Vain, womanising Tony and passionate, manipulative Andree met eight times in eleven months in the blue room at the Hotel des Voyageurs for afternoons of abandoned love. For Tony the conversation that last time was just the casual, almost banal, talk of lovers. But for Andree it was something else. And it led inevitably to an appalling double murder and a nightmare which Tony couldn't escape. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The evil eye at work?
Was the cod fishing trawler Océan under the influence of the evil eye, as the Breton sailors believed?

Nothing went right on the voyage to Newfoundland. The captain showed signs of mental unbalance. A cabin boy went overboard and was lost. The fishing was bad. And finally, at the end of the trip, the captain was strangled!

The young radio operator, Pierre Le Clinche, is accused of the crime, and Maigret is looking into the matter at the request of Pierre's former teacher.

It looks as though there's a woman in the case.

With a few subtle allusions Simenon perfectly captures the kind of violent, out-of-control passion some men feel for a certain type of woman. And how masterfully he contrasts the reek of cod entrails with perfumed female flesh!

Maigret soaks up the angry, unsavory atmosphere surrounding the crime, as he gets to the heart of the matter. ... Read more