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Robert Beech

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Tout Maigret, Tome 1 : Pietr le Letton ; Le charretier de la Providence ; Monsieur Gallet, décédé ; Le pendu de Saint-Pholien ; La tête d'un homme ; Le ... du carrefour ; Un crime en Hollande

by Georges Simenon

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Robert Beech said: " I've read at least half a dozen of Simenon's Maigret novels and enjoyed them all. So I was delighted to find that someone has collected the whole set into an omnibus. Apparently there are 75 novels and 28 novellas in this collection, of which I now h I've read at least half a dozen of Simenon's Maigret novels and enjoyed them all. So I was delighted to find that someone has collected the whole set into an omnibus. Apparently there are 75 novels and 28 novellas in this collection, of which I now have the first two volumes (each containing 8 novels), of which I have now finished the first one. This obviously makes me expert enough to comment on the whole oeuvre. The first Maigret novel came out in 1931, and the beginning reads much like American Noir crime stories of that era (think Dashiell Hammett, set in Paris), but develops into much more of psychological study of the characters. Not "who dunnit," but why they dunnit, and how does a person's life get to the point where that seems like the only reasonable thing to do. It has struck me in reading other Maigret novels, that there are no villains in the typical sense of that word. There are people who kill, people whose lives must be understood from the inside before their actions make sense.
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Have now finished the second one, "Le charretier de la Providence." As a mystery, I think it relies too much on back story elements that are not revealed until almost the end of the book, but the setting: the canals of rural France in the 1930's and people who spend their lives on those closed waterways were fascinating. Again, a murder mystery with no villain, but a complex psychodrama, in which the why is more important than the who.
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I finished the third one in the series, "M. Gallet, Decede". The story involves a corpse, who in life was a man pretending to be someone else, who perhaps was pretending to be someone else. The plot has more "reveals" than a Shakespearean comedy, but Simenon still manages to make the characters feel "genuine," even when they are trying to convince the world, and themselves, that they are someone entirely different from who they are.
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Fourth one in the series, "Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien." What can I say, that I haven't said about the first three? Only Simenon could tell a story about a black-mailer who burns the money he extorts from his victims, then kills himself when he loses the means to keep blackmailing, and by the the time you get to the end have painted such a picture of the blackmailer that you say, "of course, what else could he have done?" ...more "

Jun 19, 2017 06:26PM · see review

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