Maigret and the Dead Girl - Georges Simenon

Fans of series featuring fictional detectives, even if they have not read any of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels, are likely still to be aware of the author’s name and general reputation. Even though Simenon died in 1986, the Belgian author’s books are still easily found in bookstores all over the world. Obviously, Simenon was one of those writers who neither feared nor ever encountered writer’s block because he is said to be the author of over 500 novels and stories. Just his work featuring Inspector Maigret totals 75 novels and 28 short stories. In addition, almost two hundred of his stories were adapted into movies or television shows. But even with all of that work available to me, Maigret and the Dead Girl is the first Georges Simenon book I have ever read. 

And I know exactly why. 

I find it difficult to read the work of authors whose personal behavior bothers me so much that I can’t read them without constantly thinking about their lack of character. Ever since I learned that Anne Perry was once convicted of a brutal Australian murder (her real name is Juliette Hulme) I can’t read her murder mysteries. Similarly, for years all I really knew about Simenon is that he was accused of collaborating with the Germans in France during World War II and that because of that he was not allowed to publish anything new for five years after the war ended. So I didn’t read Simenon either. But my curiosity was aroused a few days ago after a friend gave me copies of ten of the novels from the Penguin Books series featuring Maigret. It helped, too, to find that the novels are all short enough to be read in just a day or two (1954’s Maigret and the Dead Girl, for instance, is only 171 pages long).

Maigret and the Dead Girl, a rather straightforward murder mystery, is the forty-fifth of Simenon’s seventy-five Maigret novels. As a mystery, it’s not all that much, and I was a little unhappy with the way that the mystery was eventually resolved without giving readers what I would consider a fair shot at solving it for themselves. It is impossible to solve this one until the books very last few pages – or to even single out a logical suspect or two. It all resolves around the young girl whose unidentified body is found just off a Paris street a couple of hours after midnight. No one knows her name or much of anything about her, so Maigret and his men have to determine who the victim is and why anyone would want to kill her. If you are a fan of police procedurals, you are likely to enjoy this one.

Georges Simenon

Inspector Maigret is a rather serious man who seldom displays anything resembling a sense of humor or irony. All the humor in this one comes from the unusual character known as Inspector Lognon, a man whose fellow policemen have nicknamed “Inspector Hard-Done-By” because of his belief that everyone else is involved in some kind of secret conspiracy to keep Lognon from being promoted. The truth is, though, that Lognon is a plodder who has to work twice as hard as almost everyone else just to keep up with them. Maigret is constantly worrying about hurting the man’s feelings, even though he sometimes feels that he is competing to solve a crime with a man who never sleeps or even goes home. 

Another amusing thing about  this 1954 novel is how often Maigret, no matter what the time of day, manages to stop off for a beer or a drink while traveling across the city to interview one witness or another. Maigret never encounters a bar he doesn’t find interesting enough to wander into for a quick drink no matter where he is headed. And then there’s Simenon’s obsession with street names and intersections. The author seems to believe that it is necessary for the reader to know exactly which street every witness lives or works on, every street on which the victim has lived or worked on during her entire life, and the street-location of every bar (and there are a lot of them) visited by Maigret and his crew, etc. The problem for American readers is that all the street names are in French and they start to all sound alike after reading one or two of them on what starts to seem like every other page of the book.

Bottom Line: Maigret and the Dead Girl is a good police procedural but these guys are plodders and they spend the entire book reconstructing what happened to the young girl whose body was dumped on a Paris street. And then, disappointingly, the mystery is resolved in a Sherlock Holmes manner at the very end of the story. The mid-series Inspector Maigret is interesting enough a character that I will eventually return to the series, but that’s more because I’m a fan of noir fiction than that I'm a big fan of Inspector Maigret.