Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse
“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré When he is tasked with solving a seemingly motiveless murder, Inspector Maigret must rely on his famous intuition to discover the truth A retired manufacturer is found murdered with his own pistol in his favorite armchair, shattering the tranquility of a quiet Paris community. The neighbors describe the Josselin household as a bastion of bourgeois compatibility, and Inspector Maigret is stymied by the absence of motive and by the reticence of the bereaved wife. It is not until a chance witness recalls an odd encounter between the deceased and a man in a bistro that the veil of propriety protecting the killer begins to dissolve. Maigret suspects that he’s not being given all the facts in this case as he is drawn deeper into the complex web of family dramas and lies at the heart of it. In Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse, he must rely on his famous intuition above all to uncover the shocking truth.
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65 primary books66 released booksInspector Maigret
Inspector Maigret is a 66-book series with 65 primary works first released in 1930 with contributions by Georges Simenon.
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Summary: A good man is shot in his home and there does not seem to be any suspects.
I was first turned on to Georges Simeon's Inspector Maigret by John Wilson during a not that long-lived Books and Culture Podcast episode. Simeon is a French mystery novelist that wrote around 500 books, short stories, or novellas. Nearly 150 of them involve Inspector Maigret. Penguin has commissioned new English translations of the whole set and they have been coming out at a very nice clip. I have read several, mostly in order from the start. I have been picking them up as they come on sale for kindle. I decided last week when I picked one up (it is still on sale as I write this) that I would go ahead and read it even if it is theoretically 58th in the series.
There is nothing about the book that really requires you to know the Inspector. And I do not think I missed too much by jumping to the middle of the series. It is brief, I read it in three not too long sittings. This is more of a psychological mystery (think Inspector Gamache rather than a whodunit like Agatha Christy or Sherlock Holmes.)
There is no point in giving the story away, but what I like about Maigret is that his gift is not being intellectually superior to everyone, but that he learns to know people, and he keeps doing the next thing. It was refreshing to read a quick mystery and a reminder that I need to be reading more fiction.