Product Description
It's closing time at the Gai Moulin, and Jean Chabot and René Delfrosse are planning to rob the till to pay of their debts. To their surprise, they stumble upon a dead body. What at first seems to the police an open and shut case proves more complicated when the body turns up next at the zoo, stuffed into a wicker basket. Into the puzzlement steps Maigret, who makes one of the most dramatic and colorful entrances of his career as he sorts out the tangled web of deceit.

Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon.
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Customer Reviews (6)

Maigret lays siege in Liege
Georges Simenon sends his intrepid Parisian detective Maigret to Liege, Belgium in this nifty little crime novel of murder, larceny and international intrigue.A Greek national of mysterious background is murdered after spending an evening in a seedy Liege nightclub.Two adolescent boys become involved when their own attempts to raid the boite's cash register go awry.Inspector Maigret has meanwhile entered the scene, identified as an unknown, "broad-shouldered" stranger by everyone that the Belgian police pull in to question about the Greek's murder.As always, Maigret suspects that the basest of human motives is at the bottom of the seemingly complicated murder, and ultimately solves the first crime while uncovering a second, larger one.

"Maigret at the Gai-Moulin" is a neat little package of a story that visits some of Simenon's favorite themes: human foibles, abuses of wealth and power, and the social and economic gaps between the monied and working classes.This is a fine read in the Harcourt series of Georges Simenon reprints that go all the way back to the 1930s.These books are usually witty, evocative of the place and period and right-on successors to the writings of Emile Zola and others that preceded Simenon.Recommended.

Maigret incognito
Two boys (Chabot 16, Delfosse 18) are out drinking at the Gai-Moulin nightclub. They are chummy with Adèle, a hostess paid to dance with customers, which makes them feel like men about town. But they can't really afford to be as dissipated as they wish, even though Delfosse is a rich kid, so they decide to hide out after closing and steal the money in the till.

Their plans are upset when they see a corpse in the dark. Now the almost-thieves have to worry about being implicated in murder.

The plot is unusual in that we don't see Maigret for well into the book, which is set in Liege. Instead we observe the Belgian police at work.

There are crimes upon crimes to occupy Maigret when he finally shows his hand. The Belgian inspector, of course, hardly knows what to make of his phlegmatic French compatriot!

"Like many rich people, he is bored; and, like many bored people, he craves excitement."
Long neglected and at the bottom of the barrel in sales here on Amazon, this gem takes place in Liege, Belgium presumably in 1931, the year it was written. Two teenaged boys, anxious to dip into the till of the Gai-Moulin nightclub where they waste away their time, hide in the basement until the place empties out. After working up their courage to commit their first criminal act, they creep upstairs, light a match to see where they're going, and find a dead body sprawled across the floor. They panic and run off. From this intriguing beginning, the story unwinds with a typical cast of Simenon characters and seeming contradictions.

I first quibbled with the translator, Geoffrey Sainsbury, as I thought the writing lacked the usual pop I've grown accustomed to. Word choice for a translator is key to either adding life to the prose or making the story flat. But this translation is the only one out there, and eventually the prose and pace picked up and drew me in thoroughly. Another slight difficulty for me was the non-appearance of Maigret until well past the middle of the book. We find out later that he's been there all along, hiding not just from the police, but from us too. Without Maigret, this work is merely good and gives us delicious European flavor and atmosphere as well as those ever-interesting characters.

From what I've read of Simenon thus far, his view of pre-WWII European social class structure comes across loud and clear: upper class folks are bored, corrupt, and blundering. They are contrasted to salt of the earth types, hard-working people scraping together a living, and the middle class, all of whom are knocked around by the elite. Maigret (Simenon) is the master weaver in these stories who understands the common threads with which European society is sewn and, standing apart, can analyze people's motives, morality, and lives. He himself seems to be of the middle class, as this brief description of his life at his apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir reveals: "...Maigret was looking through his mail. 'Anything interesting?' asked Madame Maigret as she vigorously shook a rug out the window." Simenon plants all kinds of characters and events in the "rug" he weaves, and then vigorously shakes them out, cleaning his concoction nicely for us. All very entertaining.

Highly recommended for a literary evening by the fire.

A different Maigret
Atmosphere is stranger than in others Maigret's novels. But it's also very good novel. If you have read "Pedigree" (Simenon's childhood autobiography) you can make interesting parallels between one of the two young boys and Simenon himself. It seems to say to us that the line between criminals and the other humans isn't very large ...

A Younger Inspector Maigret
You can compare my review to the other one on this book.OUr views are not the same.

I found this book, which I read in French while living in California, to be a delight.It takes place in Liege, in the country of Simenon's birth, long before most of the novels.And part of the suspense(for it is a suspense murder mystery) is waiting for Maigret toappear.

Eventually the large figure in his dark winter overcoat entersthe story, well supplied with his pipe(s) and tobacco, his mind racing overpossibilities.And we are not disappointed, even after reading countlesslater stories.Not only does Simenon give us a satisfactory ending, but wehave a splendid picture of an almost "old world" Liege and thekind of people who lived and worked in it.

No, definitely not just a"holiday book", this.Rather, a book for all seasons.Give it atry and you will agree. ... 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 (4)

One of his most pleasant and amusing
Like all of his Maigret books, Simenon never has his Chief Inspector take himself too seriously.In this novel, we have a very thoughtful and introspective Maigret.While working on routine matters in Paris, Maigret is asked to let an Inspector from Scotland Yard "shadow" him so that the English can learn the 'techniques' of the famous Maigret.The man who comes to watch him is Mr.Pyke (we are never given his first name) who is the epitome of the 'stiff upper lip public school' chap.

When Maigret is called to a small island of the coast of the Riviera, he takes the Englishman with him.There has been a murder on the Island of a man who called himself a 'friend of Maigret'.No one has been allowed to leave the Island so that the murderer has to still be there.In his quiet way of watching and asking 'uninteresting' questions, Maigret is able to root out the killers, and their establish their motive.

As many of Simenon's stories, the mystery itself is there to give Maigret something to do.This is an island that has only two families on it.They are fisherman and have lived this way for centuries. What's really the reason for the story is to give Simenon a chance to explain a culture that will soon disappear. With the coming of war and then the advent of multi-media, this once quiet corner of Europe will become as homogenous as the rest of the world.Desolee.

Zeb Kantrowitz

Maigret squirms under observation
A Scotland Yard detective admires Maigret and gets permission to follow him around and observe his methods. Maigret, who has no methods, is discomfited.

"Mr. Pyke looked at everything and said nothing."

Awkwardly enough, the case that Mr. Pyke gets to observe concerns the shooting of a thug who claimed that Maigret was his friend. And in fact, Maigret had long ago been kind to his consumptive girlfriend.

Was the murder a strike against Maigret, or is something else afoot?

This delightful little book perfectly captures the ambiance of the Midi and presents us with some playful insights into the competitive male psyche.

Simenon's disciplined prose is real literature, much more so than many a serious novel with literary pretensions.

A classic in a great series
An inspector from Scotland Yard comes to France to observe the police methods of the great detective Maigret as he investigates a crime.As the stoic British policeman follows Maigret around, both men feel awkward because Maigret has no methods, other than his characteristic investigative technique of immersing himself in the atmosphere of the place and in the lives of the persons involved until he knows them so well that he understands how the crime must have happened.This is a classic Maigret.

Maigret and the Observer Effect
As I understand it the term "observer effect" stands for the proposition that the act of observing changes the act of the person or thing being observed.In Georges Simenon's "My Friend Maigret" we get a story in which "observer effect" is fully in play.The result is another good Simenon "Maigret" mystery.

"My Friend Maigret" open with the good Inspector Maigret going about his normal routine in Paris.Much to Maigret's chagrin he finds himself in the company of one Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard who accepted an invitation from the chief of the Paris police to come to Paris to see the great Maigret at work.As luck would have it Maigret is advised that a murder has been committed inPorquerolles, an island of the coast of Provence in the south of France.This would normally not be of interest to the Paris police but on the night of the murder the victim (a small-time career criminal) had been heard bragging about his good friend Inspector Maigret.So Maigret finds himself getting on a train and ferry, with Inspector Pyke in tow, to the warm and sunny island to conduct an investigation.

The investigation/plot is pretty standard fare for detective mysteries. There is a murder and a small set of potential killers from a wide variety of backgrounds.What sets "My Friend Maigret" apart from the run of the mill story is the exotic location, Simenon's spare but arch writing, and Maigret's ongoing self-consciousness derived from being observed constantly by the quiet British observer.

All in all this was a pretty good story but far from being one of Simenon's best Maigret mysteries.Nonetheless, average Simenon remains a cut above the average for this genre.Fans of Simenon and Maigret should enjoy "My Friend Maigret".However, as someone who gladly prmotes Maigret at every opportunity, I don't think this would be a good introduction for a reader new to the Maigret mysteries.I think Lock 14 (Inspector Maigret Mysteries), Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard (Inspector Maigret), or Inspector Cadaver (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)would make for a better starting point for anyone interested in Maigret.Once Maigret has a chance to grow on you, "My Friend Maigret" will make for an enjoyable read.L.Fleisig
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Product Description
Inspector Jules Maigret has fallen into disfavor with his Paris superiors and has been shunted to a district supervisor's job on the northern French coast. Depressed and bored, Maigret regains a sense of purpose when a corpse is discovered in the house of a retired judge. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

All it takes is a battered corpse to cheer him up...
In disgrace for some unnamed misstep, transferred ignominiously to a backwater, Maigret is pathetic in his desolation - until a corpse appears on the scene.

The minute Maigret determines that indeed, there is a body in the Judge's house, as the village busybody maintains, he's his old self. Maigret back in Paris could scarcely be happier.

Suspects who flee or won't talk, villagers who lie like troopers, young women who misbehave shamefully, past tragedies that obscure the present - nothing brings the chief inspector down.

Maigret's exuberance is contagious, and his characters irresistible. Rarely does crime make such lighthearted reading.

Mussel-gathering
Maigret has fallen into disfavor and has been appointed divisional superintendent in Lucon. There are mussel-gatherers in the vicinity.Mussels cooked in cream is mouclade.

There are two mysteries--a corpse, and why Maigret has been transferred.Maigret derives sensual enjoyment dealing with mysteries.Maigret wishes that his machine for crime solution could be made available to him, but in its absence he must proceed anyhow. That is to say, Janvier and Lucas and the others have had to remain at their posts in Paris.

The story takes place in 1940.Some of the villagers still wear clogs.The working methods of Maigret are displayed here in abundance.He runs through village informants and family members of the suspects, past and present, exhaustively.Maigret's sweep of people to be interviewed and ideas to be pursued is broad and deep.The result is satisfactory.

Out of favor with the Paris administration, Maigret is demoted to divisional superintendent in Lucon
Maigret in Exile is decidedly among my favorites.The copyright is 1942, a time when France was under German occupation. In Georges Simenon's fictional world of his Chief Superintendent Maigret, there is no direct mention of the war. However, Maigret has fallen into disfavor and has been reassigned from Paris to the post of divisional superintendent in remote Lucon. No one - including his wife - knows why. His new routine activities do indirectly suggest that something is amiss in France: he is concerned with a group of Poles that needed watching, the failure of some unspecified individuals to produce identity cards, and contraventions of restricted travel orders, etc.

The situation changes quickly when a sixty-four year old woman, Adine Hulot, specifically asks for Maigret; she reports that for two days a corpse has been lying on the bedroom floor in the adjacent villa, the home of Judge Forlacroix, formerly a magistrate at Versailles.The corpse is clearly visible from atop a ladder leaning against an apple tree. Adine and her husband have kept watch for two days. They believe that the judge will dispose of the body when the tide comes in tonight. And so begins a classic Maigret mystery.

Chief Inspector Maigret's home locale is Paris, but occasionally Maigret ventures elsewhere. His excursions into rural, provincial France are particularly fascinating. If you enjoy Maigret in Exile, I recommend the two following stories.

Maigret Goes Home (published in 1932, first published in English in 1940) is among the best stories by Simenon that I have encountered. It takes place in 1928, early in Maigret's career, and involves a unique visit to Maigret's childhood home, the village of Saint-Fiacre. Maigret Goes Home is a compelling story, one in which the mystery puzzle, the characters themselves, their psychology, and the intriguing locale all share front stage.

Maigret Goes to School (December, 1953) is another of my favorites. On an early, dazzling spring day Maigret accepts a plea to help a schoolmaster accused of murder in the small coastal community of Saint-Andre-sur-Mer. Maigret recognizes that his decision was perhaps less influenced by the claimant's plea and more by his own memories of white wine and fresh oysters characteristic of the Charentes region. ... Read more

Product Description
Four intriguing cases from the files of the famous French detective, Jules Maigret: "Maigret goes to School", "Maigret and the Old Lady", "Maigret Hesitates" and "The Patience of Maigret". These full-cast dramatizations have been specially adapted for the radio from Simenon's original novels. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Simply perfect
Whenever I read a less-than-satisfactory mystery, I return with such relief to a Maigret, the prose so elegantly unpretentious, the scenes so true to human nature, the compelling characters rendered seemingly without effort.

Maigret receives an anonymous letter predicting a murder. He has the unusual paper traced to the establishment of a rich lawyer, Emile Parendon.

Parendon is delighted to meet Maigret, acknowledges that the paper belongs to his household and offers the superintendent free access to his home and his family. He is a long-time admirer of Maigret. Although Parendon specializes in Maritime law, he admits to an obsession with Article 64 of the French Penal Code, which states that an insane person who commits a crime is not responsible.

This is a bit odd in the circumstances, but a lowly clerk tells Maigret that everyone in the house is "nuts": the eccentric reclusive lawyer, the society wife who creeps around the house like a spy, their strangely independent children and the young secretary who's having sex with the boss.

Totally out of his element in this sumptuous mansion, Maigret has no clue who the victim will be, let alone the letter-writer or the potential murderer. He must rely on his ability to read the human heart.

This is a delicious Maigret, perfect in its simplicity and poignancy.

FROM BACK COVER
A mysterious letter lures Maigret into an elegant but bizarre Parisian home.

Maigret has received crank letters, but this one bears a difference - carefully written on sumptuous stationery, it states that a murder might take place but that the correspondent is unsure who the murderer and, in fact, who the victim will be.Maigret has no trouble tracing the stationary to the home of the Parendon family; from there on, however, clues to the potential crime are difficult to trace.In his inimitable way, Sienon has crafted a superb mystery and also drawn, with compassionate insight and clinical precision, a remarkable portrait of the obsessive personality

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (February 13, 1903-September 4, 1989) was a Belgian writer who wrote in French.
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Product Description
Pedigree is Georges Simenon’s longest, most unlikely, and most adventurous novel, the book that is increasingly seen to lie at the heart of his outsize achievement as a chronicler of modern self and society. In the early 1940s, Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood. He showed the initial pages to André Gide, who urged him to turn them into a novel. The result was, Simenon later quipped, a book in which everything is true but nothing is accurate. Spanning the years from the beginning of the century, with its political instability and terrorist threats, to the end of the First World War in 1918, Pedigree is an epic of everyday existence in all its messy unfinished intensity and density, a story about the coming-of-age of a precocious and curious
boy and the coming to be of the modern world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Growing Up, One Sense at a Time
This book is a mesmerizing account of one city, Liege, Belgium, and the surrounding Flemish countryside, as encountered by a boy growing up in his mildly manipulative mother's rooming house.We learn more and more about Liege as the narrator grows into his own mental awareness of the sounds, the smells, the food, the social fabric, the cultural tensions brewing as the First World War arrives, occupies Liege, and drains away.We experience the internal tension of adolescence as well as the boy learns that adults lie, that women are dishonest, that virtue is not necessarily a blessing, and that vice is not always as satisfying as it may seem.A wonderful book for anyone interested in the pale light of Northern Europe, civilian life during either World War, and the human commonalities of coming of age.

Mots Pathetiques
That this book is, I suppose, at least geographically autobiographical: not a paving stone, a butcher's apron, a prostitute's décolletage or any other minute observation or memory of the mean streets of Liege, Belgium before and during the First World War is left to the reader's imagination.Every mole and crevice is described.But it is NOT a Bildungsroman or a psychological work.The first two thirds of the book - if they centre on anything - centre on the doings of Elise, Roger's mother, and her attempts to ensure that the boy will be able to drop the hyphenation in petit-bourgeois when he comes of age - hence the title.Only in the last section does the book settle around Roger.But, throughout, the book consists only in reportage, in hard-bitten observations made thoroughly from the outside.One closes the book not having the faintest notion of an inner life, not having learnt anything of the characters' hearts or minds, save when they express it - as when Roger's acquiescent father bites his pipe for all, or some, to see - and thus can be reported.The German occupation during the war seems to have little effect on the family, save to give Elise - at first - better paying boarders and to open a black market from which Roger and his schoolboy chums can profit.

"Roman Dur" is entirely inappropriate as a title for this type of book.It is scarcely a "roman" at all.It has no narrative structure, no characters the reader comes to like or dislike, nor insights into a deeper reality - the raison d'etre of all literature for what English author Malcolm Lowry called "deep readers." It's not truly "dur" either."Tawdry" and "shabby" are the English adjectives that come to mind as descriptive of both the writing and the subject.

So, my pardons to Luc Sante, who writes the Introduction here of a book he apparently didn't finish (Roger's father, Desire - accents over the "e"s - has not died at the end of the book, as Sante says, though his death does seem imminent) but what Simenon has written here amounts to a jumble of "Mots Pathetiques" which do not add up to a "Roman Dur" or to anything worth one's time.Sante tells us that Simenon kept it "in the drawer" for five years between writing and publication.One only wishes that it had remained there for another, say, five hundred.
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Product Description
An actor and a divorcee meet in a deserted New York City afterhours bar. With little in common save loneliness, middle age, and a presentiment of escape, they improvise a love story. The fragility and fear that drive their experiment from moment to moment, bedroom to bedroom, transform this boy-meets-girl into a literary potboiler in which risk becomes salvation. Georges Simenon — supreme master of the modern psychological story — has been praised by writers from Ernest Hemingway to Andre Gide. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

A dark novel of sexual obsession and isolation
Although the late Georges Simenon (1903-1989) may well be the best selling novelist ever, relatively few American readers know him. And if they do, it's likely for his Parisian Inspector Maigret detective series.

However, Europeans know him well. They even call any compressed, economically written and tense psychological novella of obsession a simenon, after the Belgian-born writer. This newly released edition of his searing 1946 novel of sexual obsession and isolation, "Three Bedrooms in Manhattan," with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, fits the category perfectly.

In it a dissolute French actor François Combe, stranded and sleepless in his New York room after a devastating split with his wife, chances to meet Kay Miller in an all-night Greenwich Village diner. Kay, another European, Viennese, and likewise rebounding from a broken marriage--hers to a Hungarian diplomat--echoes Combe's loneliness and decadence. Together they walk: from seedy bar to seedy bar swilling whiskey, chain-smoking, revealing bit by bit pieces of their broken pasts, and eventually succumbing to a sexual frenzy, all of which leads eventually to a type of desperate love.

In the hands of a less deft writer, such a story might melt into melodrama or dissolve into a weak, predictable cliché. But here, as always, Simenon rejects sentimentality, infusing his taut story with a sordid tension in a dreary, mechanistic world where loneliness and isolation ironically thrive amid throngs.

Simenon wrote his novels (some 400, which have sold over 200 million copies in scores of languages) in grueling two-week immersions into his characters, taking himself to the edge of physical and emotional exhaustion. With this novel the emotional cost must have been heavy, as it mimics his impassioned affair with Denyse Ouimet, whom he met in Manhattan in 1945 and who, five years later, after he divorced the current Madame Simenon, would become his wife.

When so submerged in a novel, Simenon pushed himself to write a chapter a day--a practice reflected in this novel, whose chapters generally run some 15 pages: a day's work. But it's the quality, not the prodigious quantity, of his output that causes it to endure.

The lean prose; the simple declarative sentences (or sentence fragments); the absence of metaphors, modifiers and writerly ostenation mark his simenons. He once remarked that he had learned from the French short story writer and editor Colette to eschew literary affectations. So, in writing, he cut "adjectives, adverbs and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence--cut it...cut, cut, cut."

Simenon's spare written words carry weight. An admirer of impressionist artists, he strove to give his novels a third dimension and fullness, as those artists did to their paintings. Like the pointillist Georges Seurat, who painted in discrete dots that took shape and value at a distance, Simenon, who once described himself as a pointillist writer, uses staccato sentences and short paragraphs with few transitions.

Yet somehow, in reading, it all blends together to form a vibrant, believable and often chilling whole. Mere words don't get in the way of the emotional experience being conveyed by them; the dream that Simenon creates remains unbroken by any egotistical authorial intrusion.

Indeed, at times the emotion experienced by the reader grows so intense that it is painful to turn the page. When Kay leaves to visit her ailing daughter in Mexico City and Combe latches onto (or is latched onto by) a beautiful girl in the Ritz bar, the reader cringes at the string of misjudgments Combe then makes, apparently fateful errors that seem certain to lead him into a self-destructive sexual encounter.

But as always--even in his mystery novels--Simenon never judges and never averts his piercing gaze from the most sordid and depraved human actions, the weakest and most human failings. His is a decadent world, where wives betray their husbands with young gigolos, where mothers abandon their daughters for money, where strangers have sex in taxicabs and cinemas, where men inexplicably beat the women they love.

His world is also one of seeming meaninglessness, where true human contact and communication appear nearly impossible. Where men and women alike are driven to despair and destruction by inner compulsions that defy logic and undermine their own happiness.

Yet here, for once, as Combe and Kay move from a cheap hotel to his rooms to her bedroom, they achieve a sort of connection, remarkable if only for its honesty. Somehow Simenon has created a romantic novel without romantic moments, a moving love story devoid of loving acts.

My First Simenon - Interesting & Uncomfortable
I learned a great deal from the introduction to this novella provided by Joyce Carol Oates. George Simenon is credited with creating "a sparely written and tautly constructed novella" now called a "simenon". Components of such a work are brisk inevitability of plot, startling and ironic conclusion, a structure which mirrors a cinematic sequence, and much more which form an intriguing formula. Novellas have always appealed to me because of their length not that I am a lazy reader by any means but I do enjoy the occasional swift conclusion.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan follows two very sad characters that in their individual pain form a co-dependency that could hardly be called attractive. This is mainly true of the lead male who is especially pathetic and who keeps with Oates' description of a simenon's main character: "male, middle-aged, unwittingly trapped in his life - is catapulted into an extraordinary adventure that will leave him transformed, unless destroyed".

I did enjoy Simenon's take on New York in 1946 as there are several walking tours he sends his characters on. I enjoyed less the circular desperation of the two main characters but that is only because it was honest and raw - the oft used phrase of "train wreck" comes to mind. At the end there is a whiff of possible redemption and happiness but it seems too remote to provide any real optimism.

For some people it's easy
Let me add that Simenon offers that rare combination in art--artistic skill and fabulous productivity. There's Mozart and Hayden and Bellini and Des Prez and Defoe, as against the tormented labors of Beethoven. There's Dickens and Simenon and Shakespeare and A Trollope and Hugo and Dumas (pere), and DeMeung, as against Conrad and Flaubert and Hemingway, who suffered and suffered. Some people are born lucky. Are there any interviews with Simenon that offer an explanation? By the way, Simenon's closest peer in the golden age of detective fiction is Graham Greene: Both are consumate wordsmiths, both eschew the vegetive world tho setting their fictions in romantic locals, and both write successfully in several modes of fiction.

Good, but Not Quite Good Enough
One of Simenon's roman durs, novels that are bleaker in tone, THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN, is good, but not as good as two others I have read, Tropic Moon (New York Review Books Classics) and The Engagement (New York Review Books Classics).Simenon again takes the literary style best associated with crime noir, using short, hard sentences, and applies it to a non-criminal story.

In THREE BEDROOMS, the story is that of two lonely people meeting by hapstance and thereby changing everything.Francois is an out of work French actor who has come to New York after his wife humiliatingly left him for a younger man.Kay is a woman with a past who, by her own admission, would have taken about any guy who would have her.As happens all too frequently in real life, when two damaged souls meet, they discover the nicks and cuts in one's personality fit into those of the other like a key into a lock.Francois and Kay meet, and it is as if their previous lives no longer matter.

The writing is at times extraordinary.The rain drenched streets of New York at night are as clear as if the reader were looking at them with the light of the full moon.The story, however, becomes a little too pedestrian after awhile.And Simenon is a little too, well, French at time.Francois loves Kay, then cannot stand the sight of her, then is so madly in love as to be in an abyss, and on and on and on.While the French are good at noir (there is a reason why the concept is stated in the French), they can lay it on a bit thick at times.It is what keeps THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN from being any better than average.

Set Your Dogs And Wolves On Me
Though neither a crime nor a detective novel, Georges Simenon's Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (1946) nonetheless takes place in the lonely, desperate, claustrophobic, and paranoid world of most of the author's other books--of which there are hundreds. The story of a recently divorced French actor, Francios, who takes up solitary residence in Manhattan until he encounters and becomes dependent upon an unattached woman who is also of foreign birth, Three Rooms In Manhattan is a dark examination of a crippled human psyche. Simenon had few peers when it came to writing psychological fiction, and despite a hopeful if slightly improbable ending, the novel is gripping and seductive. Simenon also excelled at recording the vicissitudes of human emotion under stress, and his earnest depiction of Francios, who is crippled by jealousy, delusion, and rage, is superb.

Early in the novel, Simenon shrewdly depicts Kay, the object of Francios's obsession, as a listless, calculating mythomaniac, so much so that during the book's first 50 pages, Kay seems like one of the permanently wounded, misplaced female protagonists found in Jean Rhys' five novels. But readers are seeing Kay through Francios's blighted eyes, and Kay eventually manifests on the page in quite a different fashion. Nonetheless, Three Rooms In Manhattan revels in the grim, the sordid, and the violent, and an ugly fog of sadomasochism continually hangs in the air. Few 20th Century writers, with the exception of Denis De Rougemont, Jean Genet, and Vita Sackville-West, in her diaries, have had the courage to depict the cruelty and desire for domination and submission that lies just beneath the surface of passionate love.

Appropriately, the book takes place in mid-autumn, when the New York City weather routinely shifts between the transcendent and the unpleasant. The novel's first half revolves around a sometimes nightmarish schedule of endless, compulsive, and directionless walks which the couple takes through the city. Stopping only to drink and smoke in bars, and occasionally to eat, Francios and Kay are two lost souls seeking solace in one another, and both incapable of being apart and unable to be alone, except for the briefest of intervals. All the while, unspoken suspicions, recriminations, and phantoms from the past hang in the air.

Modern readers may find Francios misogynist in the extreme, as he spends a great amount of psychic energy spewing volleys of hatred towards Kay in his imagination, even while he walks calmly beside her through the haunted city streets. The idea of taking active revenge against all of the women who have wounded him--especially against his ex-wife, who has left him for a much younger man--through Kay is never far from his consciousness. But Simenon superbly reveals how it is the ostensibly subservient and masochistic Kay, and not Francios, who is the stronger of the two. Accepting even physical abuse, Kay manages to remain perceptive, objective, and resilient, while her lover repeatedly collapses in bouts of tears, humiliation, and self hatred. For Francios, passion and deep anxiety are synonymous; unable to live independently, he discovers that love is a stifling, suffocating trap too.

The mood of fatalism that suffuses Three Rooms In Manhattan was somewhat prescient; Simenon, upon whom Francios was based, eventually married Denyse Ouimet, the woman who inspired the character of Kay. But Ouimet later "lapsed by degrees into psychosis," and the child of their union, Marie-Jo, committed suicide.

Most of Simenon's non-detective fiction has been long out of print in America; New York Review Books is to be commended for bringing this and several other classic Simenon novels back into circulation.
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Product Description
Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon.
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Customer Reviews (5)

No motives and few suspects
We all know how paranoia can grip the elderly. So when an 86-year-old lady tells the police that someone is entering her apartment when she's out and moving things around, and that someone may be following her too, can we blame Maigret for being a bit skeptical?

Will she have to be murdered before Maigret believes her?

This is a low-key case that doesn't make headlines, yet Maigret, once he gets started, gives it his all. There's a secret somewhere, maybe in the keeping of the needy relatives. Yet why rob or kill an old lady when you're going to inherit her money anyway? The Chief Superintendent is at a loss for a motive.

The sun shines persistently throughout the story, in contrast with Maigret's lack of inspiration.

Once again Maigret is cutting back on alcohol, but he does succumb to a second glass of wine at one point. After all, "Dr. Pardon would never know."

Delightfully old-fashioned
This simple and old-fashioned mystery was a pleasant surprise.There was nothing flashy, or garish, or over-the top about it - a straightforward police whodunit.Some readers might find this a trifle boring - we've gotten so used to multiple storylines and side-stories that it's a little hard to switch gears and wind down to something so basic, but it's worth it.Reminds one of simpler times, and harkens back to the days of Agatha Christie (Poirot, though, not Marple).

It's not precisely a solve-it-yourself, but it does give you plenty of food for thought.Even though it's a very short book, the characters are well-written and interesting, giving you even more incentive to at least try to decipher the ending.It's possible, but I think it's more luck than skill if you figure it out.Granted, there are none of the dizzying twists and turns of more 'modern' mysteries, no technology or romance, but it's still very much worth reading for any true mystery fan.

Marvelous piece of work
This is one of those rare detective novels with an excellent plot, well-defined characters, great atmosphere, and in a language without a wasted word.Only Ed McBain, among American detective fiction in the police procedural sub-genre, is a rival.

Chief Inspector Maigret is not hard boiled, no tough talking cop, nor is he exceptionally perceptive or brilliant.He just attaches himself to the case and plods relentlessly.Here a tiny, 86-year old widow is murdered, after complaining to the police that her apartment has been very slightly disturbed several times while she was shopping or sitting in the park.No one in authority pays much attention to her until after she is strangled.Why would someone kill such a harmless person?She has no valuable jewelry, no cache of money.Maigret must find the motive and the killer with meager clues.

Perhaps the most impressive element of this and other Simenon novels is the economy of language, albeit in translation from the French.There is plenty of detail but without wasting a word.The Simenon books should be studied by crime writers for the narrative technique alone.

Thoughtful Writing
This is a thoughtful well-plotted mystery.The author does a fine job portrayng Maigret, the other detectives, the victim (an elderly lady), her niece and her niece's son.The writing is simple and easy to understand.Simemon does not waste words but he brings the characters to life.The reader will be kept guessing until the end of the book.

Ideal summer vacation reading
Imagine drinking a glass of Calvados.The title is ambiguous.She was a tiny woman insisting upon seeing Chief Inspector Maigret personally.Madame Antoine, aged, having lived in her apartment for a long time, reported that her things had been moved.There is only the key she keeps in her bag.A niece and her son are her only relatives.She is pefectly aware that a young person might consider her mad.The concierge says she is very much like any other old person living by herself.Her clear gray eyes make an impression on Maigret. Then she is murdered, suffocated, and an investigation ensues.The police search and question, after all this is a police procedural.Maigret discovers that the victim had practiced twenty five years of thrift.A character named Le Grand Marcel is brought into the picture.

The fineness of the writing (translated?) transcends the genre.Picking up a Maigret novel is a matter of dealing in a brand name consumer good.One is never disappointed.The storytelling is simple, classical, felicitous.Simenon used masterful economy in his art.The short bursts of information create an almost Raymond Carverish style. One is transported to Paris in the Spring.Time spent in the company of Maigret and his gifted inspectors Lapointe, Lucas, and Janvier is a pleasure. ... Read more

Product Description
The small French town of Concarneau is a summer resort. In winter it becomes the deserted, rainswept scene for a series of murder attempts that attract the interest of Maigret. While his assistant Leroy uses "science" and "deductions" to trace the murderer, Maigret's instincts unerringly guide him to the real killer past a labyrinth of fascinating characters: a paranoid failed medical doctor turned real-estate shark; a passive, working class waitress whose heart secretly burns a torch of passion; an aristocratic politician who pressures Maigret to "make some arrests"; and a snarling stray dog that knows the murderer's real identity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Maigret after all rocks!
Now this book,being from 1931, must belong somewhat to the adolescence of the detective novel genre. It's actually an ok read. The setting for this crime story is rural France, that is the fishing town Concarneau on the Bretagne coast. The dick of Georges Simenons books is called Maigret and he is actually quite cool. He is a strong self-willed character, who refuse to take any crap from his surroundings, and seems alive and kicking even today. Embedded in this book is also a social criticism. The book drew a picture for me of early 20th century France, which was somewhat surprising to me. It's evident that if you are a prominent person, rich, factory owner, or the mayor of Concarneau, then you can get away with things the small people can't get away with. In terms of bribery, camaraderie and manipulate the authorities. This is things we would expect from a developing country like Turkey, Philippines or Russia, but apparently it was also like that in France at that time. Anyway I shall not disclose the plot here, just know that Maigret cuts through all the conventions and nail the crooks! Also the book has even got a touch of the creepiness Poe.

Fear Reigns in Concarneau
First one of the town's leading citizens is shot in the stomach in a doorway. Then his friends still inside the café barely escape being poisoned.

Maigret shows his usual distain for evidence and deduction. He's more intrigued by the yellow dog wandering around the scene of the crimes - and the poignant face of the young barmaid who sleeps around a bit.

More incidents occur. The reporters swarming all over the hotel seem to know more about the crime wave than the police!

Maigret's flair for inaction, and his sensitivity to atmosphere, are nicely portrayed in this book.

Early Jules Maigret Story
This story was written in 1931 soon after the very first Jules Maigret stories started coming out.It takes place in a small fishing village on the coast of Brittany.Someone is trying to kill town notables and the only clues are a stray yellow dog and some very large foot prints.A perfect location and jumping off point for a Jules Maigret mystery.

The fun of a Georges Simonon novel is the unique way in which Inspector Maigret approaches a crime.At one point Maigret notes, "I ran this investigation from the end backward-which doesn't mean I won't go the other way in the next one.It's a question of atmosphere, a question of faces...When I first got here, I came across one face that appealed to me, and I never let go of it."

It is this odd perspective that is so appealing in the Maiget stories.It is an approach which separates him from the Anglo-American tradition of mystery writing.It is the individual genius that counts and not the investigative procedure. Jules Maigret is the essential "bella figura" or man of genius. The fun of this novel is that the reader sees the character of Maigret while he still being formed by Simenon.Maigret evolves into a character who will appear in 75 novels of which more than 500 million editions will be sold.For those who love Inspector Maigret, these initial novels are an important indicator of what type hero he will become.

A "Dogged" Good Job by Maigret
Those of you who are also readers of Ed McBain, will notice the similarity to his books.In this story we get a new feel for Maigret who is a Superintendent in this one, and is once again at his very annoying best.It's always a pleasure to read how Simenon loved to 'stick it' to the Provinciales in between the wars France.He loved to open the door on their pomposity and their groping for status.

The story is pretty straight forward, but it's the way that Maigret goes about what he does that is so much fun.While everyone is watching his every move, including a good portion of the Paris national press, he goes about as if he doesn't care.Smiling at everyone and puffing on his pipe he is the archetypical civil servant in no hurry to finish his work.Meanwhile the Mayor is spending all his time trying to protect the good name of his Town.

The ending is almost 'Hercules Pirot' in style, with everyone of the candidates brought together in the Police Barracks at the end to hear Maigret deductions.More than anything there is a decision by Maigret to protect two of the characters who are then left to go on with their lives, as McBain does in many of his stories.

Quick and Satisfying
This is my first Simenon title ever. Yet Inspector Maigret is hardly foreign to my sensibilities, as his independence, brilliance, and taciturn pipe-smoking personality have disseminated throughout countless popular mysteries, films, and TV shows. I found this mystery quite entertaining, even though it follows the well-worn path for such works as throwing out dead-end clues, and assembling a cast of peculiar characters together in a dreamy mysterious setting. Penguin's neat new printings of these classic tales are easy on the eyes. In this particular story, the coastal town of Concarneau is thrown into a frenzy by a series of attacks on its prominenet citizens. A skittish hotel waitress is obviously part of the mystery, as is a large yellow dog who suddenly appears on the scene. Everything is satisfyingly resolved in the end, and Maigret appears to be a genius. This is a quick, neat read, full of atmosphere and literary sensibility. I'll be visiting Simenon again shortly. ... Read more

Product Description
Why are Emile and Marguerite Bouin still married? They cannot stand each other. This is evident from the moment we meet them, isolated and wordless before a beautiful fire. Their only correspondence is an occasional invective jotted on a scrap of paper--this discreetly flicked across the room to the recipient's lap.

A bizarre situation to be sure, but ideal for Simenon. Taking marriage born of a desperate need for companionship and following it to its devastation eight years later, Simenon patiently makes hate almost as alluring as love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent, but a difficult subject.
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.

Marital hatred (some may consider plot spoiling review)
In this 1967 novel (one of roughly 400 published before his 1973 retirement), Georges Simenon portrayed an elderly couple that had come to hate each other. It is not that they had been living together for decades. Both had outlived earlier spouses and wed eight years before. Marguerite fancies herself a fine lady. She still owns some buildings, though her father once owned the whole street, which is named for him. Emile was a working man who helped her with a burst pipe and stayed around. He dotes on a cat that Emile cannot stand for a number of reasons, including concern about her own pet, a parrot.

While he is sick, she poisons the cat. He takes vengeance on the tail feathers of the parrot, worries about being poisoned himself, runs away (not very far to a room above the bar his sometimes sexual partner runs) for a while. Marguerite is humiliated by his departure and silently implores him to return, where they continue to prepare food separately and communicate only by notes. As the houses across the street (which her father once owned) are being loudly demolished, several time, "he almost spoke to her; he wanted to say something, anything, appeasing words. He realized that it was too late now and that neither of them could turn back." They are together until death doth them part.

The novel is a portrait of savage marital disgust for each other, strongly ( but not entirely) slanted to the grievances of the man. Simenon seems to share Emil's view that "she needed to be unhappy, a victim of men's wickedness," forgetting no outrage to her refined sensibility and not recognizing any faults of her own. Husbands getting fed up and leaving was a recurrent theme for Simenon (M. Monde Vanishes). "The Cat"was filmed with Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret as a couple who had once loved each other, a past unlike the one Simenon supplied the characters. ... Read more

Product Description
Mystery legend Georges Simenon comes to Penguin with classic works in celebration of the iconic Inspector Maigret’s 75th anniversary

One of the world’s most successful crime writers, Georges Simenon has thrilled mystery lovers around the world since 1931 with his matchless creation Inspector Maigret. Seventy-five years later, the incomparable Maigret mysteries make their Penguin debut with three of his most compelling cases.

In Lock 14, Simenon plunges Maigret into the unfamiliar canal world of shabby bars and shadowy towpaths, drawing together the strands of a tragic case of lost identity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Engaging Mystery
It was the first Georges Simenon book I have read.French friends of mine had been telling me that I had to try some of his mysteries, so I randomly picked this one.It was a great read.Very engaging, a good story that was not predictable, and the detective, Maigret, was a very believable detective, with good old fashion sleuthing skills.It is a short book, and a really nice one to curl up with a snowy or rainy afternoon.

Interesting look at prewar France
"Lock 14" was originally published in France as "Le Charretier de `La Providence'", then it was translated in by Robert Baldick in 1963 and printed in English as "Maigret Meets A Milord"; there were a few revisions over the years and there was a title change to "Murder At Lock 14", and then the change to the present title in 2003.

This is the second in the long series (seventy-five!) of Maigret novels that Simenon wrote, see [...] for a complete list of them,and the first that I have ever read, so I don't know how it stacks up to the later ones.In "Lock 14" there is a body found strangled in the stables near the locks of Marne, and Inspector Maigret from the Flying Squad is sent for.He finds that the body is that of Mary Lampoon, one of the passengers from the party boat "Providence".

The trouble is that nobody on the boat seems terrible concerned over her death, getting anybody to cooperate is like pulling teeth, and she may have ties to somebody that lives at the locks.

Simenon's story is clever, and labyrinthine, and there are plenty of red herrings.The problem, for me, is that the story has a meandering sense to it, and Maigret is so taciturn and bluff, that he almost seems to be walking about in a semi-coma.In "Lock 14" Maigret has no personality, and ends up being just a dull character; while on the other hand, "Lock 14" has a fascinating background as we see how the French locks of the pre-WWII thirties worked.

While this novel has seen many editions, I was attracted to this book, besides the price, it was on sale, was two things.First of all, I had heard a lot of Maigret and Simenon over the years, and this was my chance to sample a very early example of his novel writing.The second is the book itself.It is a very attractive digest sized paperback with a stark black and white photo on the cover, with the photo laid over an equally stark art deco design.I've since seen others in this reissue series and they all look similar and would look nice on your shelf.An entertaining and clever mystery despite a rather dull and restrained leading man.

Maigret enters a weird and watery world...
In this atmospheric novel, Simenon immerses us in canal life, a curiously fluid realm where it's almost always raining, and the inhabitants soak themselves besides in wine, beer and hot toddies at all hours of the day and night.

Maigret is adrift in a world he knows nothing about. He knocks down a few beers himself to get acclimatized.

Corpses appear in unlikely places, and there are never any witnesses. Clues abound, but are they fishy? A yacht full of dissipated foreigners holds out the promise of some suspects, yet the vacillating Chief Inspector feels obliged to look longer and deeper.

This is an excellent Maigret, with an ultimately likeable cast of sots and sinners.

Good, but beware of duplicate
"Lock 14" is, like most Maigret mysteries, very enjoyable.The flaw is, this book was previously published under the title "Maigret Meets a Milord," which I already had.Of the 75 Simenon books I own, this is the first time I've encountered this problem, so I can't complain too loudly.I only hope publishers will try to be consistent with titles, that's all.

a satisfying little mystery
Acclaimed author, Georges Simenon, once again weaves a capturing tale of mystery and suspense, with the astute Inspector Maigret at the wheel. A series numbering over 100 books, the Inspector Maigret series - after a long stint of unavailability - has, thankfully, been reintroduced by Penguin Books to readers hankering for good mysteries. With an intriguing plot and a cast of believable characters, Lock 14, set early on in the Maigret series), is a swift but gratifying read.

Brusquer and less loquacious than Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, Inspector Maigret is all business as he takes on a new case that is sure to perplex even the most skilled of sleuths.

Set in France, in the region of a lock located on a busy section of canal, Lock 14, recounts the underhanded goings-on along these extensive waterways. With commercial barge interchange in the lock, coupled with high-class yachts and tourist boats, which were often gathered in close proximity, the result was an aquatic melding pot of working class and "upper crust" societies.

The varying degrees of society in the vicinity of Lock 14 have apparently collided, on a rainy April day, when two dockmen stumble upon the cadaver of elegantly-clad Mary Lampson while rummaging under the hay in a stable; 5 hours dead from apparent strangulation. Inspector Maigret is called to piece things together. First to be interviewed is the dead woman's husband, Sir Walter Lampson, an Englishman and retired colonel of the Indian Army, whose pleasure craft is docked near Lock 14. The Inspectors sharp instincts are alerted when Lampson, along with fellow passengers of his yacht - who seem only bent on a life devoted to decadence - appear oddly aloof and indifferent to the murder. Ultimately shedding light on a heartrending occurrence of lost identity and lost love, Maigret gradually pieces together the stories of those involved, and how Mary Lampson and a second victim met their untimely end.

Regardless of the descriptive language outlining the characters, conspicuous is the lack of background on Inspector Maigret himself. Simenon leaves the reader guessing about the Inspectors persona, and the depths that lie beneath his somewhat gruff and abrupt exterior.

Despite their small size, Simenon's Inspector Maigret series of mystery books are highly satisfying and concentrated with page flipping "who-dunnit" suspense, keeping readers captured until the final pages. Lock 14, itself, saw publication in 1931 and yet remains accessible and a pleasure to read. These are excellent books that are small and easy to pack for a weekend getaway or outing, and can be easily enjoyed in a few brief sittings. ... Read more

Product Description
In The Friend of Madame Maigret, Simenon’s economic prose brilliantly portrays the Marais quarter of Paris and those who haunt its narrow streets as Inspector Maigret attempts to prove that a murder has actually been committed without a corpse anywhere to be found. As the investigation becomes increasingly complex, seemingly unconnected characters are drawn into the case, and Maigret begins to wonder if his wife’s earlier strange encounter with a woman and her baby may be the missing link. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Jules Gets Help From Madame

If you don't know Maigret and you like detective stories, then you are in for a treat - or about 76 treats because that's how many Maigret novels the prolific Georges Simenon published. (I take this number from an excellent essay in the Times Literary Supplement about Simenon by Paul Theroux called "Georges Simenon, the existential hack". The essay is available online.) As with many of the Maigret stories, this one is also published under another name, Madame Maigret's Own Case. Most, if not all, of the books in this new series were previously published under a different title.

Maigret is a seasoned French chief inspector of detectives with an eye for human foibles and a distinct humanism about his policing. Some lists include this title as one of the best of Maigret. Personally, I haven't found much to choose between them - as long as they are primarily set in Paris. Don't be put off by the title (either title). Madame Maigret's role, while key, is also collateral. She provides some crucial information, but Jules really does the work along with his crew of Lucas, Janvier and a very young La Pointe.

Highly recommended.

The human noir comedy
The book - like many others - contains everything which was promised in Simenon's biography by Assouline: a short crime novel more focused on the power of human instinct than on the crime itself, on the grey monotony of life than on a complex plot (easily untangled), on the quiet disappointment of human nature than on any unexpected deception. Closer toDostoievsky than A.Conan Doyle, probably because Simenon wrote crime novels where - in the end - the crime didn't matter as much as the reasons for it.

More fine French wine from Simenon
Slightly jumbled in the outset as Simenon's arranges his puzzle pieces;all comes together near the end in a delicious contretemps between Maigret and the ambitious,scheming Maitre Liotard in the Chope du Negre.The dialogue sparkles. The atmospherics of Paris are,as always,real and entertaining.Maigret's relationship with Madame Maigret is more fully explored in this fine roman policier.

Another good potboiler from Georges Simenon
"The Friend of Madame Maigret" deals with body parts in a Marais shop furnace that somehow connect to an encounter by Chief Inspector Maigret's wife with a woman and a tot in a park on the Place d'Anvers. The geographic coordinates are no accident in this story or any other by Georges Simenon.The Parisian context and the individual streets, shops and cafes are all integral to these fine mystery tales.

While a fine yarn, "The Friend..." is one of those mysteries where a great deal of information is sprung on the reader in the final pages--the good Chief Inspector having figured it all out in his head previously.This story stays just on the acceptable side of witholding for my taste, but the zig-zagging through the world's greatest city to get to the solution is so enjoyable, who can complain.

"The Friend of Madame Maigret" is one of the old/new, mini-sized Maigret mysteries published in 2007 by Penguin.Bless them for re-issuing these classics.

"The Seine was gray like the sky..."
In this fast-paced engaging Parisian tale, the great Chief Inspector Maigret's wife innocently finds herself in the center of a murder case that's sent Paris into a media frenzy. The case involves the usual array of quirky and interesting characters who live on the fringes of society. And once again, Simenon displays a marvelous ear for dialog, for description, and for the class and social structures around him. This reader was thoroughly bollixed and without a clue as to what was going on, who did what, and how the whole wonderful concoction was going to resolve itself. But of course, Simenon wrapped up every loose thread into a satisfying bow, even as he wrote the very last sentence of this entertaining yarn. He was a true master of this genre. And the relationship between Maigret and his wife is such a wonderfully warm and loving one. It's always a pleasure to be a part of it in these books.
Read and enjoy.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Not Totally Satisfying.
I intentionally picked a book that looked lightweight in order to get me back in the practice of reading earnestly, and this book certainly didn't disappoint as far as its lightweightedness is concerned.

I wanted something thin and not too difficult, but this doesn't mean I didn't want something emotionally and intellectually satisfying. It's a ho-hum mystery with not too much thrillings. Georges Simenon doesn't even make it very suspensful with who the killer is.

Maigret Sets A Trap isn't bad. It's just--plain. Something you could read in a couple of days, discard, and forget about immediately.

I'll tell you one thing: just be grateful your mother isn't like the lady in this one. I can see how the guy became a serial killer.

A real detective at work
It's not dames, blazing guns, nor exploding fists.It's a battle of wits, stake outs and interrogations that set Inspector Maigret at the top of his profession in a series of 88 books written by Simenon between 1930 and 1972; books that led to movies and a TV series.A good case could be made that Simenon was the Arthur Conan Doyle of his day and Maigret his Sherlock Holmes.Written in 1955, "Trap" presents a Jack The Ripper style serial killer who has evaded police for five months while stabbing and killing a woman per month.Following an after dinner discussion with a psychiatrist, Maigret forms a plan to trap the villain.The plan is put in motion, and seems to work.But did it?There has been another killing and the Inspector is beside himself with guilt.This is a fast paced read of 170 pages that seem to turn themselves.In Maigret, Simenon has created an interesting, consistent character with human traits and foibles that lend a great deal of believability to the story.A good-sized step above pulp fiction, the Maigret books are a pleasant way to spend a few hours.

This book hard to put down!
The suprise ending makes you want to read more! ... Read more

Product Description
While committing what he intends to be his last burglary, "Sad Freddie" discovers something completely out of his line: the body of a dead woman, her chest covered in blood, holding a telephone in her hand. Inspector Maigret is called in to solve the crime, and after an exhaustive search, a psychological duel, a marathon interrogation, and innumerable glasses of Pernod, wine, cold beer, and brandy--a sure sign that this is no easy case--the famous French sleuth triumphs.

Maigret is a registered trademark of the Estate of Georges Simenon
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

There's no problem a Pernod can't solve.
Georges Simenon was born in Liege, Belgium, in 1903. A hugely prolific writer, his best known creation is Inspector Maigret - a French policeman, based in Paris. "Maigret's and the Burglar's Wife" was first published in 1953.

The book opens with Maigret being visited by an old acquaintance called Ernestine Micou. Unfortunately, they had known each other professionally, rather than personally. Seventeen years previously, when she had been more widely known as Lofty, Maigret had arrested her in a small hotel near the Porte Saint Denis. (It had only been a petty theft but Lofty didn't make things easy for Maigret - who'd only been a young cop at the time. She was stark naked when he arrived and refused point blank to get dressed). This time, however, she's coming to Maigret for help - and has arrived fully clothed. Lofty is now married to Alfred Jussiaume - also known as "Sad Freddie", the unluckiest safecracker in France. He had once been employed by Planchart's, a firm of safe makers. Since he installed safes right across Paris, he knows exactly where to go and how to break into them. Unfortunately, he never finds the one big payday he needs inside the safe he has chosen. Despite having already spent five years inside, the press love him, and paint him as something of a romantic figure. Two nights previously, according to Lofty, Freddie went out on a job in Neuilly and never came home. He'd phoned Lofty at five in the morning from a little cafe near the Gare du Nord. Apparently, he'd stumbled across a corpse mid-job, and was spotted fleeing the scene. Since he'd left his tools at the scene and he'd be easily identified by his bike, he's clearly afraid of being set up for murder - so he's decided to make himself scare. There's only one problem : there have been no reports of any murders in Neuilly and no random bodies turning up. Maigret decides to look into things anyhow : he starts with Planchart's, looking for the houses in Neuilly that had a safe installed by Sad Freddie had worked in. They soon settle on Guillaume Serre's house as the most likely scene...unfortunately, not only do the Serres deny there was a murder, they also deny there was an attempted burglary.

A fun book and not a particularly long one - however, it doesn't feel rushed at any point and all the bases are covered. Monsieur Serre isn't a likeable sort - surly and unhelpful, he seems strangely unwilling to answer Maigret's questions. However, Maigret plays it shrewdly, poking in all the right places and asking all the right questions. Very enjoyable.

Someone's lying, but who?
Sad Freddy, the safecracker, who wouldn't hurt a fly, stumbles on a corpse while doing a job. He flees in panic, leaving his tools behind. And now his wife Ernestine, an off-and-on prostitute, begs Maigret to clear Freddy of murder.

Maigret decides to trust her, for the moment anyway.

The trouble is, there's no corpse to be found - only a lovely home inhabited by an elegant old lady and her dentist son who deny having had a break-in. Simenon faces the daunting task of identifying an invisible corpse and the motives behind the crime (if there was one).

Simenon has a genius for filling out Maigret's character bit by bit in each novel, which may partly explain why these little books are so addictive. You keep wanting more.

Ernestine's levelheaded affection for her hapless husband adds to the charm of the story. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Patient MaigretCuts to the Chase
The English and American schools of crime detective fiction ultimately come from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and "Murders in the Rue Morgue," in which the solution of a crime is effected by the application of deductive reasoning from start to finish. These "tales of ratiocination," with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes being the apotheosis of the reasoning investigator, are still the norm today in the English-speaking world.

Such is not the case in France, where Georges Simenon has created an entirely different kind of detective, Superintendent Jules Maigret. In MAIGRET AND THE YELLOW DOG aka THE PATIENCE OF MAIGRET (1936), a man named Mostaguen has been cut down by a bullet in the Breton seaside town of Concarneau. At the scene of the crime is found a strange ungainly yellow dog. The victim belonged to a informal (and somewhat unpopular) group of businessmen who got together for cards and drinks every night in the bar of the Admiral Hotel.

Superintendent Maigret is called in to investigate, along with Inspector Leroy. No sooner do they arrive, than attacks on the little group begin to ramp up: an attempted poisoning with strychnine, a missing local newspaper writer taken from his car leaving bloodstains behind, and the murder of a notorious philanderer. All these occur more or less under Maigret's nose. As the mayor begins to lose his patience with the big city investigator, the Paris press moves in en masse and camps out in the bar of the Admiral Hotel, kibitzing his every move.

From the start, Maigret and Leroy take divergent paths. While the latter attempts to apply close deductive reasoning, his boss hangs out in the bar and has his attention riveted to the barmaid, Emma, and the yellow dog, who is somehow drawn to her. He instinctively feels that these two are somehow at the heart of the investigation and slowly begins to add to his knowledge of these two until the fog lifts.

For most of the novel, Concarneau is besieged by foul weather; and the town is full of confused, frightened people who inevitably jump to the wrong conclusions and put pressure on Maigret and Leroy to follow up on their suggestions. Maigret not only keeps accumulating evidence but rudely ignores the press, the mayor, and the residents while marching to his own drummer. In the end, Maigret's instinct trumps Leroy's patient data-gathering and the wild surmises of the others, and everything falls together as the bad weather finally breaks, leaving Concarneau and us readers bathed in sunlight.

The brooding quality of the scene, the confusion of the other characters, and the mysterious, almost solipsistic concentration of Maigret are the ingredients that make this a most delectable detective novel. This is the tenth Maigret I've read, and he seems to get better with every book I read.

Maigret is an humanist
Even if you dislike police novels, you have to read Maigret's novels (and others Simenon's non Maigret novels) because of the humanism and psychology in these novels. And more over, you have the pleasure to dive in the Simenon's atmosphere : close to impressionism (only few words to restitute an impression ...).
This novel, in particularly, is a good example of Simenon's art.

Archetypal early Maigret.
If I was to initiate anyone into the world of Superintendant Jules Maigret, 1931's 'The Yellow Dog' (a.k.a. 'Face for a Clue') is the book I would recommend.The story is set in the Breton harbour town of Concarneau, and begins with the non-fatal shooting of a prominent citizen one stormy night.His friends, card-playing regulars in the Admiral Hotel cafe, fear they will be next, and sure enough strychnine is soon found in their pernods.Escalating fear in the town is accompanied by a mysterious giant's footsteps and a yellow dog always present at the crime scenes.The Mayor who has sent for Maigret becomes exasperated when the policeman seems casually indifferent to the case, allowing further crimes to occur.

'Yellow Dog' is model Maigret for a number of reasons.It crystallises the Maigret detective method, rejecting Holmesian deduction or modish scientific procedures, the Inspector preferring to silently absorb the atmosphere of a place, the charactetrs and faces of its people.The progress Maigret makes with this infinite patience he keeps to himself, exasperating superiors, colleagues, citizens, even the reader.In these books, crime isn't static, a thing of the past to be frozen and endlessly analysed, as in Agatha Christie et al, but a fluid, ongoing part of the social fabric.The book introduces the young Inspector Leroy, who, throughout the series will become Maigret's most trusted ally.The narrative plays variations on Simenon's favourite themes, most especially the different levels of vice and transgression in French communities, hypocritically categorised by class.His charting the development of public fear into the violence of mob panic is terrifying and prescient.

But 'Yellow Dog' is especially notable for the clarity of what one might term Simenon's tripartite characterisation.First of all, there are the actual human characters, whom Maigret observes, and generously allows the freedom to reveal or hang themselves in their own words, waiting for them to play their petty charades and deceits, before breaking down to the truth.Though Simenon can be sentimental, on the whole, they are not a pretty bunch.Secondly, the meticulous evocation of place, with the vivid description of the harbour; the town divided into the Old, with its ancient, narrow, winding streets, and New, with its markets, gaudy hotels and the ever-recurring clock; the dingy tavern with its oppressive, aquarium-like windows; the persistant presence of dirt and trash, visible emblems of barely concealed social rottenness.And thirdly, the presence of the weather, mostly dark, windswept, beating rain, but breaking into festive plays of light.The story begins with a brilliantly atmospheric, cinematic panorama of the empty town in which the crime is almost incidental; the most forceful set-piece is literally cinematic, as Maigret and Leroy shiver on a roof, spectators looking down through a window-'screen' at a silent lovers' drama they can only partly comprehend. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Make a new plan, Stan
Georges Simenon was prolific without ever being prolix.He wrote hundreds of novels, most notably his Inspector Maigret mysteries. But some of Simenon's best work in my opinion can be found in what he called his "romans durs" ("hard stories"). In those stores you typically find a middle-aged male, leading a middle class life or a petty criminal living life on the edge of society. In each story the protagonist hits a bump in the road (often of his own making) and this slight bump takes him off his normal life path and puts him on a wild downhill road to the depths of darkness.

Simenon's Maigret stories and romans durs are enjoying something of a new life with new issuances by Penguin (Maigret) and New York Review of Books Press (romans durs). However, many more remain to be reissued and I've read all the reissued Simenons.As a result, on a recent trip to my public library I couldn't resist picking up two `older' Simenons, "The Outlaw" and The Rules of the Game that have not yet found their way into a new edition."The Outlaw" is a good example of Simenon's hard story format and is well worth reading.

Stanislas Sadlak, (Stan), is an illegal immigrant from Poland living in Paris in the late 1930s. He has fled Poland rather than face criminal charges for murder.He is not a likeable character at all and as the book opens he and his girl-friend Nuschi are down and out and on the edge of starvation.Stan botches an attempt to rob a taxi driver and in desperation reaches out to the Paris police. He offers to rat out a violent gang of Polish criminals living in Paris in return for enough cash to get him and Nuschi back on their feet again.After this `introduction' Simenon takes us on the rough bumpy ride that flows from Stan's decision to turn informer.

There is a lot to like about "The Outlaw". Simenon does a very good job of portraying Stan as a very unsympathetic character.Nothing that has ever happened to Stan has been his fault. Nothing.In fact, none of the characters in the book, even the police, have much in the way of redeeming or appealing character traits.Simenon is not one for false empathy or redeemed criminals.Life is tough in the demimonde and so are the villains and the police that go after them.There is no one to root for and, so, the reader is left with nothing but the story. But in the hands of Simenon the story is more than enough.As I mentioned at the outset, Simenon was prolific. However, the writing in each of his books is sparse and free of adornment.The story begins, it moves quickly, and it ends. If you are looking for tortured, complex sentences and deep musings on the meaning of life, Simenon is probably not for you.He tells a story and leaves the musings to the reader, not his characters. The story was enough and it was both satisfying and absorbing.

I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Simenon or just an interest in good, dark stories.L. Fleisig
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