Georges Simenon
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903-1989) was a Belgian writer who wrote in French. He was extraordinarily prolific, publishing over 500 novels and numerous shorter works. He is best known and mostly represented here by his novels featuring the detective Jules Maigret.
Between 1931 and 1972, Simenon published 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. In doing so he created one of the great detective personas, worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Travis McGee. Compared to such colleagues, Maigret is almost nondescript — he is gruff, patient, scrupulously fair, quiet, persistent, thoughtful, non-demonstrative. He has no real eccentricities, no flourishes, no quirks, no attitude other than determining what happened and who was responsible. And yet, his world and his existence in it is compelling, even addictive. Whatever issues his creator may have had with truth and good behavior, Maigret is dedicated to them in all their relative messy relationships with people and their stories and their lives.
The books do not have to be read in any particular order. Once you sample one, however, and want to try some more (inevitably), you may want to read a stretch of them in the order in which they were written. Sometimes the only clues to the passing of time in our “real” world are the technological changes mentioned in the novels. Maigret — ageless, steadfast — remains the same.
Maigret and the Saturday Caller
Maigret and the Saturday Caller
"One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories." --The GuardianMaigret is visited by a troubled man and asks him to keep in touch, hoping to curtail his criminal impulses--but when the man disappears, Maigret must investigate a crime that may or may not have occurred
When Maigret returns home at the end of a long day, he is surprised to find a tense man named Léonard Planchon waiting on his doorstep with an unusual problem. Planchon wants to kill his wife, or perhaps his wife and her lover, who for two years have been making him sleep on a cot in the dining room. He has even worked out a plan to hide their bodies in concrete. Uneasy and hoping to stop the man before he goes too far, Maigret must investigate a murder that has not yet been committed and uncover the truth behind this peculiar ménage à trois.
A fast-paced, psychologically astute mystery, Maigret and the Saturday Caller follows the inspector through Montmartre as he patiently questions Parisian partiers, bartenders, and others as to Planchon's whereabouts, stripping away a bit more of the mystery's camouflage with each encounter until they lead him to their shocking conclusion.