Georges Simenon Inspector Maigret investigations

1.Georges Simenon : Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett

Penguin 1963

Paperback 144 pages

The pages of the book are yellowed

In Simenon's first novel featuring Maigret, the laconic detective is taken from grimy bars to luxury hotels as he traces the true identity of Pietr the Latvian.

price 8€

2. The Third Simenon Omnibus: Maigret Has Doubts, Maigret & the Minister, The Old Man Dies

Published by Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, 1971

Paperback 366 pages

The pages of the book are yellowed

Maigret Has Doubts

Doctor Pardon, Maigret’s old friend, confides the details of one of his cases after he has entertained the Maigrets to a dinner in his apartment. It is the story of a dying Polish tailor whom he cannot save. Pardon is more concerned about the man’s hysterical wife, needlessly as it turns out. Maigret understands. In turn he tells Pardon about one of his own cases, something he rarely does with anyone. The story is told in flashback, as the two men drink and smoke after their dinner. It was the story of Adrien Josset, a pharmaceutical firm executive accused of the savage murder of his wife.

Maigret and the Minister

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le CarréWhen a public tragedy threatens to expose a scandal within the Paris government, the Minister of Public Works calls in a favor to Maigret A public project has collapsed and resulted in the death of 128 children after a report warning officials about the unsafe structure was disregarded. Now, that report has resurfaced, along with allegations that several politicians and contractors involved with the project may have suppressed its findings to avoid a scandal. Maigret must enter the shifty world of politics, dodged by members of the security police wherever he goes. In an unfamiliar world of decadent diplomatic officials, fanatic followers of political parties, and suspicious staff in politicians’ entourages, Maigret grimly sticks to what he knows finding the perpetrators of criminal acts

The Old Man Dies

The Old Man Dies. The old man is Auguste, the owner of a celebrated restaurant in the Halles district of Paris. When he collapses dramatically and dies soon after, his family gather round like jackals waiting for financial pickings. The suspicions set up in the mind of each member of this very disparate family while they search frantically for a will and for expected fortune lead to an explosion of greed and disappointment which splits brother from brother.

price 9€

3. MAIGRET STONEWALLED

Penguin Books 1979

Paperback 144 pages

The pages of the book are yellowed

During a very hot Summer, the body is found of a commercial traveler in his hotel room in Sancerre. Shot in the face and then stabbed in the heart, the gunman seems to have got clean away after inflicting the fatal stabbing with the victim’s own knife as the poor man tried to fend off his attacker. The victim was a regular visitor known as Clement but it quickly emerges that he was actually Émile Gallet. An outwardly conventional petit bourgeois living on the outskirts of Paris, he had in fact constructed an elaborate double life, which he had been leading for the best part of 18 years. He arranged for pre-written postcards to be sent to his haughty wife (of noble birth) from the various stops on his old route, faked letters from his old employer and even kept a false ledger of sales to make his wife believe that he really was still doing his old job. But perhaps all was well with his scheme as he had also started secretly receiving mail from a ‘Mr Jacob’, apparently demanding money. This is of course a classic theme in Simenon’s work – that of a man who dreams of another life and comes a cropper when trying to enact it, so it is fascinating to see it here in embryonic form.

price 5€

4. Strange Inheritance

Published by Pan Books, 1958

The pages of the book are yellowed

Penniless orphan arrives in a small fishing port and finds he is the sole heir to the town’s business empire. A rich young man marries a factory girl, then falls in love with his uncle’s widow. A double-locked safe contains the secrets of a town’s well-heeled families. A woman is arrested on suspicion of poisoning her husband. The bored wife of a wealthy businessman has an affair with the family doctor.

price 14€

5. The Snow Was Black

Publisher Signet book 1950

Paperback 176pages

The pages of the book are yellowed

Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go.Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me , Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.

price 14€

6. Maigret has Scruples.

Penguin books 1963

Paperback 128pages

The pages of the book are yellowed

Xavier Marton, the head of the toy department at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, a model train specialist, visits M to say that he thinks he wife wants to poison him, but leaves while M is out of the room. Later in the day the man's wife, Gisele Marton, also visits M, to tell her side of the story, which is that her husband is having delusions. Marton comes the next day, and agrees to have another examination with a psychiatrist. But he warns M that if she poisons him, he'll shoot her before he dies. Meanwhile, M has had both of them investigated, and finds that Gisele's sister, Jenny, is living with them, and that Marton is apparently enamored of her. Gisele, on the other hand, is apparently the lover of her employer, M. Harris. M has the house watched during the night, and by morning Marton is dead, accidentally poisoned by Jenny, when Gisele switched her cup of tea with her husband's. He had poisoned his own, with enough to make him sick, but not to kill him. Jenny thought he hadn't the nerve, so she added the poison to kill her sister.

price 5€

7. Maigret's Revolver

Publisher Penguin 1963

Paperback 141 pages

The pages of the book are yellowed

Madame Maigret is upset when a young man who had called to see Inspector Maigret steals the revolver Maigret had been given as a keepsake by the American police. Mme Maigret had taken a liking to the youth and is fearful that he may intend to take his own life. Maigret fears the gun may be used for different, more criminal purposes. Either way, he feels it necessary to try to track the young man down. But first he’ll have to find out who the boy is…

price 9€