Maigret’s Anger
“It was 12.15 when Maigret went through the permanently cool archyway and out of the gate flanked by two policemen who were hugging the walls to get a little shade.”
Sometimes it doesn’t feel like Maigret is a cop. He always seems fairly human, and one of the strengths of this series of detective novels is that Maigret feels real and the cases never feel too terribly wild. So the end result is that Maigret solves a mystery using mostly good police work, and not the kinds of intuition that Poirot uses or the kinds of near supernatural ability of Sherlock Holmes, who often pulls byzantine knowledge out of his ass at the last minute. Oh you just happened to have written a pamphlet on cigar ash?
Anyway, Maigret is human which does mean that at times he makes mistakes, but also he has an ego. In this case, Maigret gets very upset at the potential that his reputation is at stake. Cops are whiny ass shitheads at the best of times and often cannot handle even the slightest blow to their ego, and while Maigret is not exactly at the same level as an American street thug of a cop, he is often dispassionate in his solving of cases. So it’s nice to see him trying something else out.
Maigret’s Patience
“The day had begun like a memory from childhood: dazzling and flavoursome.”
Maigret is in the long game of crime sometimes. In this book, one of his longtime informants but also targets, who in the last few years has taken a bullet, leaving him disabled is murdered. He’s middle-aged to older, and recently has taken on a wife. This wife is significantly younger, and when he ends up dead, Maigret investigates in a way similar to episodes of The Wire, in which being in the same game, even in opposing sides leaves two figures more connected in their adversarial relationship than with “civilians” as The Wire would call it. So Maigret really does take to solving the mystery of the death with a kind of aplomb because someone he was close to, even as an enemy, has been killed. He does not initially suspect the wife, but her actions, and Maigret’s (and Simenon’s) misogyny can not let sleeping dogs lie when it comes to crime, and well, you can guess her initial innocent stance does not last long.
Maigret’s Revolver
“When, in later years, Maigret looked back on this particular investigation, it would always strike him as something a little out of the ordinary, associated in his mind with the kind of illness that does not declare itself clearly but begins with vague twinges, feelings of unease, symptoms too mild to take seriously.”
In this novel, we begin with Madame Maigret, who makes staggered appearances in the books being a little worried her husband will be mad at her. What is the issue? Well it turns out that Maigret had recently been gifted a gun from an American envoy to the France. The gun is a revolver, and while I do not connect “guns” to much of European literature, Maigret using a gun is pretty funny to me. Anyway, the gun was given to Mairget, and what did he do? He left it like on a shelf somewhere, and a house guest went into the study and took it, and then fled to America in order to commit a crime. While it’s extra funny already of stealing a gun from Paris, boarding a ship to the United States, and then using that gun to commit a crime, it’s even funnier given how easily one could secure a gun, IN AMERICA, if you needed to murder someone. Read the fucking room dude, we have guns aplenty mon friere.
Maigret in Vichy
“‘Do you know them?’ Madame Maigret asked in an undertone as her husband turned to look at the couple they had just passed.”
In this book a classic detective trope, the detective of the series in on vacation, and what do you know? A Murder! On vacation?! You know it!
So here we go.
I can’t say I know a lot about the town of Vichy, minus the obvious WWII connections. But apparently the town is know for its spas and rest cures as a kind of getaway from Paris. And here Maigret is, trying to enjoy that, when a murder happens.
I like this one in part because of the involvement of Madame Maigret too, who is often quite a bit more ancillary to the mystery.
