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.
The Late Monsieur Gallet [Maigret #2]
The Late Monsieur Gallet [Maigret #2]
When a man traveling abroad is murdered in his hotel room, Inspector Maigret must sift through the misdirection and betrayal to find the truth hidden beneath.
A Monsieur Gallet has been found dead—murdered—in his hotel room, in a small town outside of Paris. In Georges Simenon’s The Late Monsieur Gallet, Inspector Maigret sets off to figure out the course of events that led to this grim outcome. But as he delves deeper, the circumstances of the crime become increasingly intriguing: Gallet’s alias, his sickly pallor, his claimed profession, his wife’s and son’s strangely indifferent behavior in the wake of Gallet’s death. Using all his wits and intuition, Maigret must look beyond not-so-random coincidences and layers of deception to uncover the truth of the crime.